Happy Halloween

Tom and I would like to wish everyone a Happy Halloween!

Halloween isn't something I celebrate personally, however it is a great opportunity to do some themed sensory activities! Through out the month of October Tom and I do all sorts of halloween craft, stories, messy play and imagination play.

Today we decided to create Tom's very own haunted house. It was a lot of fun!

Every year Tom and I create our own little halloween den, the year though we decided to go big! We started the den by using Tom's PodsPlay sensory tent. If you read Tom's blog you'll have heard about Pods Play before, it is an inflatable tent that you are able to zip different covers onto to change the theme. For the haunted house I unzipped the spaceship covering and made it white, this was so I could change the colour of the lights to a green colour to make it spooky.

I then used Tom's A frame to hang strips of Crete paper from. This made a spooky entrance for Tom to go through. We also added cobwebs and spiders to make it look extra spooky.

Tom carved a pumpkin and we laid this outside, but we also used a blow up, light up pumpkin and hung that from the A frame.

On the inside of the tent we covered it with cobwebs and spiders. We also tore up loads of crepe paper (bandages) and laid them on the floor. We had a light up ghost pumpkin and hung that from the ceiling.

Once Tom was inside the tent we then explored the cobwebs and the spiders. We used this as a real sensory experience.

We then found on YouTube some child friendly ghost stories. We listened to these whilst in the haunted house, we told each other stories and explored all things spooky. It was a really lovely spooky experience.

You could create something like this really easily. All you need are some pretend cobwebs, spiders and tome tissue paper, create paper or some bandages. You could also make up your own sensory story and have props. We didn't have time to do this but it is certainly something I would try next year. You could pretend that you are walking through a haunted house and talk about all of the scary things you might encounter.

We hope you have a spooky Halloween whatever you are doing!