This fall we started a preschool co-op for my daughter and 3 other little girls. We meet just once a week for a couple hours, introduce a letter of the alphabet, and do lots of playing. The day after Halloween was my turn to host while exploring the letter G. The most popular activity has been the sensory bin – we’ve had it out all week – and all my girls have had fun pouring and mixing and pretending with it. It consists of several bags of dried black beans, dried lima bean “ghosts” with Sharpie-drawn dots for eyes, spider rings, cookie cutters, green jewels (also for the letter G), and lots of spoons and bowls for scooping and mixing. I try and keep the beans in a medium-sized bin (or for now, a cauldron) inside our sand table, to minimize a dried bean home-takeover.
I found a couple great books to read, the first called Ghosts in the House! by Kazuno Kohara. The illustrations are wonderfully fun, and the ghosts are more sweet than scary. Perfect for preschoolers. I had a sheer curtain that we played with after reading this one. The other book, Ten Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O’Connell, is a great counting book. We used our lima bean ghosts to countdown the ghosts as they left the story. The girls wanted me to read these two books over and over again.
Other activities we threw in for the morning included making green Kool-aid playdough, gluing paper ghosts and green gumballs onto a letter G coloring sheet, and pumpkin bowling – knocking down a toilet paper roll pyramid of ghosts.
For snack we had vanilla yogurt with spooky sprinkles, and frosted mini wheats!
We loved “Ghosts in the House” too!
So cute! What lucky girls!