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Halloween is just around the corner and we’ve been talking about pumpkins, bats, witches and ghosts for most of October. It’s been a lot of fun incorporating the elements of Halloween into our at-home preschool learning.
We are using Playing Preschool from Busy Toddler as our guide for at-home preschool. The second unit was colors. I decided to incorporate Halloween into our daily lessons and activities during this theme, which lasted two weeks.
The color orange was pumpkins and the color black was bats.
Then, on white day, we talked about ghosts. And that’s what I’m going to share with you in this blog post! I’m going to walk through the ghost learning activities we did for preschool. Some of the activities we didn’t get to, but I wanted to share them anyway!
I just love incorporating the seasons and special events into our learning activities. Plus, the art projects we do with each lesson act as Halloween decorations for our home, which is fun for the kids and a win for me! I love putting seasonal decorations up in our home, especially during fall.
All of the activities described below come from my newest activity pack, Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack. This early learning activity pack is a fun way for your preschoolers to practice letter recognition, letter shape, letter sounds, number recognition, sequencing, shapes and counting. There are over 10 different hands-on learning activities included in the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack. You can check out this early learning activity pack inside my Teachers Pay Teachers store 😊 Click on the image below to go directly to the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack.
One tip I wanted to share before diving into each of the activities is to print the activities on white cardstock. I recommend laminating for durability. Laminating also gives you the opportunity to reuse the activities! I am planning on using these activities again with my son when he gets older so laminating will keep them good as new for several years.
Reading Ghost Books
We always start our preschool lessons with a book or poem. I looked through our Halloween book collection, which is quite large, and pulled out two short picture books with ghosts as the main characters. We read The Spookiest Halloween Ever! by Teddy Slater and Five Silly Ghosts. Below are more of our favorite ghost books for little ones 😉👻📘
If you don’t have any books about ghosts, be sure to check out your local library or YouTube. There are tons of videos of books being read aloud on YouTube. There’s even some included with Prime Video.
Fun with Ghost Letters
After we read our books and talked about what happened in each story, we moved into phonics. During phonics, we focus on letter recognition and letter sounds.
First, we matched uppercase letters with lowercase letters. I chose to focus on the letters in the word “ghost” for this activity. We named each letter and identified the letter sound. Then, my daughter matched each uppercase ghost with each lowercase ghost. This actually turned out to be a worthwhile activity for my daughter because she is still unsure of some uppercase and lowercase letters. She knows all of the uppercase letters in the word “ghost”, but some of the lowercase letters were challenging. So we did this activity a few times to further develop her knowledge of the uppercase and lowercase letters.
We love tracing letters, shapes and numbers! We like to trace our uppercase and lowercase letters with a dry erase marker (another benefit of laminating our activities or putting them in a clear plastic sheet protector) and building each letter with Play Doh, Pipe Cleaners or Wikki Stix.
We try to do a hands-on activity with the letters we are learning each week. My daughter loves using Play Doh and Wikki Stix. Of course, she prefers to freely play and create with both. Therefore, I just tell her we will build the letter shapes first and then she can build whatever she wants after.
To further practice letter recognition, write each letter on sticky notes. Include some uppercase and some lowercase for each letter. Then place the sticky notes around the house. Have your child go on a hunt for the sticky notes and place it on the matching letter ghost. This is an engaging activity for those active learners. It gets your little one up and moving, too! You can even give your child a flashlight to search for the letters. My daughter is all about the manipulatives so using things such as flashlights is extremely motivating to her!
Engage your preschooler in a picture card beginning letter sound sort. We did something similar during our beach-themed learning experience. Using pictures or objects found around your house, focus on the beginning letter sounds /g/, /h/, /o/, /s/ and /t/. Simply print out pictures on cardstock, laminate if you want to reuse, cut out the pictures and guide your preschooler as he/she places each picture on top of a ghost with the same beginning letter sound as the picture. There is a set of 20 pictures, 4 for each letter, inside the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack.
You can do a similar sorting activity using items and toys already in your house. Collect several items that start with each letter, put them in a basket and guide your child as he/she takes each item out and places it on the ghost (or a pile near the ghost) with the correct beginning letter sound. For older kiddos, you can have them go on a hunt for the items that start with each letter.
Fun with Counting Ghosts
After phonics, we move into math where we focus on number recognition, counting, one-to-one correspondence, patterns, and shapes. The first math activity we did was matching each colored shape to the ghost. The shapes are the mouths of each ghost! There are 10 shapes to match. As your preschooler matches them, you can name each shape, talk about the number of sides and points and other objects that may be the same shape in your home or neighborhood.
My daughter really enjoyed putting the shape ghosts back together! Each ghost was cut in half. We talked about how each ghost was in two parts: a left side and right side. She had to work on putting the two parts together to make a whole ghost. She needed to pay attention to each shape’s characteristics as she matched the ghosts.
There are five number and counting activities inside the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack. The first one includes 20 ghosts with a number from 1-20 written on it. I cut each one out, we shuffled them up and my daughter put the numbers back in order. We just focused on 1-10, but I’ve included up to 20 for those preschoolers who mastered counting and sequencing numbers 1-10.
There is a sheet of 10 ghosts. The intended purpose for this one is to use as a counting ten frame. If your child hasn’t quite mastered 1-5, then cut the sheet in half and only use one row of ghosts at a time. If your child has mastered 1-10, print a second copy of the counting ten frame and work on showing 20.
You can count anything! The point is to put one object on each ghost. Marshmallows or white chocolate chips would be fun to count because they are white. If you would rather not use food, you can use white rocks, pony beads, pom poms, or cotton balls. It doesn’t matter what you count because the point is to use the objects to practice representing numbers.
You can use the ghosts with numbers on them for this activity. Place a ghost number in front of your child. Ask him/her to identify the number and then represent that number on the five or ten frame by counting out the objects you chose.
The next activity involves counting the ghosts pictured in each rectangle. My preschooler counted the ghosts in the first rectangle. Then she found that ghost number and placed it on top of the rectangle. I left this as a single sheet, but you can cut it into individual rectangles to make it less overwhelming for your child.
The next math activity in the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack is larger versions of the ghost numbers. You can use them as a mat for counting out small objects, placing 6 mini marshmallows on top of the 6 and 3 mini marshmallows on top of the 3. Building each number out of Play Doh, pipe cleaners, or Wikki Stix is a fun hands-on activity for your young learner, too. We laminated ours and used a dry erase marker to trace each number first. Then we made each number shape, just like the letter ghosts I described earlier in this post.
The final math activity in the Ghosts Early Learning Activity Pack is a Sequencing Number Picture Puzzle. My daughter loves these puzzles and when I saw this idea, I’ve been trying to make one to go with the books, nursery rhymes and preschool themes we are reading and learning about. It’s such a fun way to practice sequencing numbers. All you need to do is cut the strips out and mix them up. Then have your preschooler put back together, gluing onto a piece of colored construction paper.
I made three different versions to accommodate each level of counting. My daughter mastered counting 1-10, so we are working on counting to 20. But she still needs practice differentiating between the numbers 6 and 9. The first level is sequencing the numbers 1-5. The next level is sequencing numbers 1-10 and the third level is sequencing 11-20. Each one is a different ghost picture so your preschooler can do one, two or all three puzzles. My daughter enjoys them so much she wanted to do all three.
Contact Paper Ghost Window Decoration
With each preschool lesson, I plan an art or craft activity to go with the book or topic for the day. Since we focused on ghosts, I used contact paper and white tissue paper to make a fun ghost decoration for our front door. I drew the outline of a ghost on a sheet of contact paper and cut three circles out of black construction paper for the eyes and mouth of the ghost. The goal of this fun project is to cover the ghost in white tissue paper.
This activity was great because both my toddler and preschooler could enjoy it. For my daughter, I actually used the small ghost numbers. We turned them all face down and she turned one face up. The number she picked is how many pieces of tissue paper she put on the ghost. I had cut the tissue paper into small squares. She wasn’t into covering the ghost as much as I thought so using the numbers practiced counting and kept her going a little longer.
The inspiration behind this Halloween Craft came from this one by How Wee Learn. I love the jack-o-lanterns, too, but we didn’t have any ghost decorations and the ghost fit perfectly with our white day for preschool!
Conclusion
There you have it! Fun and engaging ghost activities for practicing letters, numbers, and counting! As I mentioned before, all of these activities are part of the Ghost Early Learning Activity Pack inside my Teachers Pay Teachers store. I had so much fun creating these activities for my daughter during our at-home preschool 😊 I know your preschooler or young learner will enjoy each hands-on activity just as much as she did! Be sure to click on the image below to check it out!
