Halloween Book for Toddlers

Halloween shopping

This will be Camilla's third Halloween. The first one - she was 2 days old. The second one she doesn't remember at all. Probably it was a huge blur of colors and lights for her. And now she is all ready to jump into the fun.

We went to a little Halloween shopping with her and I hadn't expected that we would have THAT much fun, both of us. I picked medium-sized, toy-looking decorations to show her. She loved Elmo with a pumpkin as his belly. We watched a not so scary skeleton dancing. Camilla got a little bit scared and fascinated by a black raven who moved his head and wings. She loves owls; and that one in the store had its eyes lit up.

I realized that it could be a good idea to prepare her for the holiday so that she would notice and understand more and hopefully wouldn't be scared.

Halloween Book of Halloween symbols.

The idea of the book came from one of our favorites. "Brown Bear" by Bill Martin Jr. I've seen several different versions of playing with this book. They are all awesome!!!<3

That was a huge hit with Camilla - making our own Halloween Book. I didn't have time to go too fancy with it (we are in the middle of the soccer season). So I used a small 4 by 6 photo book.

The first page is a picture of last year's Pink Poodle, her favorite since she just realized that SHE is a doggy here. We also used it to reinforce the knowledge of color pink. We did one page a day. That day we finger painted with pink paint and called it "Pink doggy" - LOL.

Camilla,
Camilla,
What do you see?
I see flying bats
looking at me.

Flying bats coloring pages were painted with different brushes and fingers. I cut them out after painting. They are not black since I let her to choose colors. We discussed that bats are not birds, they have wings and fly at night, hence, the moon and stars. We counted two bats and one Camilla.

Flying Bats,
Flying Bats,
What do you see?
We see pumpkins
looking at us.

On day three we made fingerprints on pumpkins. I offered yellow paint first. Then, we added a little red to yellow and observed the orange paint forming. She was not interested in paint at that point. So we used her favorite - Do-A-Dot for orange. She actually had no idea what the pumpkins are. So much for playing with pumpkins for so long a year ago.

Pumpkins,
Pumpkins,
What do you see?
We see a black spider
looking at us.

The spider is colored with crayons. Camilla looooves crayons so much that she is craving to eat them even if you only mention them to her. That's why we don't use them much.

I introduced her first letter: S is for spider - just to see if she would be interested. She didn't appear to be interested or paying attention at all. But remembered it several days after that!

Black Spider,
Black Spider,
What do you see?
I see a black cat
looking at me.

The black cat is all about learning shapes and body parts. It also was the first time we used the glue. We talked about "sticky" and had fun sticking the circles to the fingers - she loved that. I made 2 sets of shapes. The first page is the shapes glued by Camilla with my assistance. The second page - she assembled the cat, and I glued the pieces in place.

Black Cat,
Black Cat,
What do you see?
I see a yellow bee
looking at me.

The last page is a picture of Camilla in her new Halloween outfit. She will be a bee.

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