Halloween Activities for Toddlers and Preschoolers

We're going on a BAT HUNT...

I found these glow in the dark bats at JoAnne's Fabric (50% off baby) and came up with a scavenger hunt-type activity for the girls. It may look more involved than it was...the entire thing took me about 15 minutes to set up.

Materials:

1 pkg glow in the dark bats

paper

pen

tape

white board or large paper for riddle

*bat masks!

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I started by coming up with a riddle that I knew wouldn't be too difficult for the girls to figure out:

"Trick or treat, smell my feet,

Hazel and Charlotte are super sweet."

 

Then I wrote the main words onto small pieces of paper that I taped onto the bats. I made a dark "cave" out of our guest bathroom by covering the small window with a blanket so we could see the bats when the door was closed (it was still light outside when we did this activity, so I did what I could to make it dark enough!)

I hid the bats all over the bathroom in reachable, but challenging places.

 Then I had the girls put on their "bat masks" to begin the hunt!

*For the masks, I cut out a long strip of Halloween fabric that fit around their heads and tied in the back. I simply cut out two holes for the eyes and that's it!

Because we chose to do this activity around CRAZY HOUR at 5pm, Charlotte would not hold still for a picture and she ended up sitting out for this activity...Can't win 'em all.

And then the hunt began! I had Hazel come into the bathroom and we shut the door to make it as dark as possible. I let her find all the bats at once and then write out the code with some help on our white board, where I'd drawn the correct number of spaces for the words on each bat.

I helped her sound out the words on each bat, giving her hints such as, "the next word in the riddle starts with the letter T..." until she eventually figured out my fancy code. 

She wrote out each word onto the spaces as she sounded them out.

 And we did have some help from a little Eloise.

Isn't she CUTE?

Ta-da! This would be fun to do with any Halloween icon that you could hide with letters or words for them to decode. We're getting so close to Halloween!