Looking for an easy Halloween counting activity you can do at home with your toddler or preschooler? I've got the perfect ghostly matching game for you!
It's easy to set up, even easier to clean up, and can be tailored to work on whatever your child is currently learning. For instance, colors, shapes, numbers, or letters! Read on to see how to set this up and do it with your kid today!
Supplies:
- White paper
- Cricut or scissors
- Black marker
- Optional: clothes pins
- Optional: Downloadable ghost printable and Cricut form (click here!)
Step-By-Step Instructions For This Halloween Counting Activity:
Create Your Ghosts:
For this activity all you're going to do is cut out some ghost shapes.
You can download a free printable here if you'd like! I ran the design through my Cricut, but you can cut by hand too.
Otherwise, you can just freehand this with some white paper and scissors!
Once your ghosts are cut out, label each with either a number, letter, shape, or color.
Set Up The Ghost Matching Game:
You have a couple of options how you do this with your child:
Fine motor activity:
On a large piece of paper, use one of the ghosts to trace the ghost outline so you have a corresponding number of ghosts and cutouts.
For instance, if you made 6 ghosts, trace 6 ghosts onto the paper.
Then you'll label each of the ghosts on your large sheet of paper to match your cut outs.
Have your child “match” each cut out to the corresponding one on your sheet – staying within the lines!
Gross motor activity:
Create your desired number of matching sets as cut outs. So if you want 6 matching sets, you'll need 12 cut out ghosts.
From there you'll tape 1/2 the matching set around a room, and give your preschooler the other matching card and have them run around the room to “match” their ghosts.
Add a fine motor activity into this by using clothes pins for each matching set. So when your toddler gets over to one of the hanging ghost shadows, they'll pin it's match with the clothes pin to it. This works on their pincer grasp.
Elongating Play:
What I love about this Halloween counting activity is that you can continue to do it over and over again!
You can do both of the above options to elongate play!
If you don't feel like cutting THAT many ghosts, you could also do it where you have 6 cut outs, and then 6 sheets of paper (instead of one large or or instead of secondary cut outs). This way you can just lay them flat for the first activity, then tape the sheets of paper up for the second activity (just make sure the ghost is close enough to the top of the page that your child can line them up if using clothes pins!
Set up and clean up time:
This takes about 5-10 minutes to make initially, but then you can re-use it over and over again and that will only take about 1-2 minutes to set up!
Clean up for this activity is also very simple. Just collect the ghosts and stack them with the matching sets. Store somewhere flat so they don't get bent. You can even use this year after year!
How my toddler liked this activity:
She had so much fun matching the ghosts! I decided to make my ghosts have the corresponding number of eyes to the number shape on them. She thought that was funny. She only wanted to do this once and then put it away for the day, but kept coming back to it over the course of a few weeks. It doesn't take her long to do this activity, but she does have fun and it definitely builds her confidence and language as she shouts each matching number!
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