Looking for a fun and educational Halloween activity for your little ones? The Hats, Cats, and Pumpkins Grid Game is perfect for reinforcing left-to-right scanning and counting skills. Easy to set up and clean up, this game combines holiday fun with valuable early literacy practice that your kids will love!
We all love our scarecrow out front, our pumpkins around the house, and the little plastic spider that hangs from a shelf in the kitchen.
So add all those objects of their affection together in a really basic grid game and let them play their way into some learning.
Playing the Hats, Cats and Pumpkin Grid Game
The concept is the same as some of our other grid games, but I modified things slightly for Halloween.
The premise of this game is super-simple, but the early literacy skills of left to right tracking, return sweep, basic word recognition and one to one correspondence it reinforces are really worthwhile.
What You Need
- Astrobright White Card Stock
- Blank Six-Sided Dice
- Flattened Glass Gems or some other marker (even Cheerios!)
I love my set of blank dice for games like this because I can put more than numbers on each side. Sometimes I’ll put a 0 on one side and then 1-5 on the other sides so that there is the possibility of not being able to move at all. Other times I might add a number sight word like “two”.
Get Ready to Play
Print out the game boards – be sure you have enough for each player to have a set of all three boards!
Prepare the dice – as mentioned above
Gather a stack of markers for each player – most of the time on our grid games we use clear glass flattened marbles, but we’ve also used acrylic diamonds and various little tokens–nothing fancy but very fun for little hands–just things sold at craft stores or things you have around the house.
I have a huge button jar so buttons are often our markers. Of course the kids always love edible markers–Cheerios, marshmallows and at Halloween– candy corn!.
For an added bit of fun – After watching Harry Potter for the zillionth time, one kiddo suggested a Golden Snitch element. So we added a star to one side of the die for an instant win!
How to Play
Set up the boards and give each player a stack of markers. Roll the dice. For each number rolled with the dice, that number of objects gets covered, line by line, beginning with the top left and ending bottom right–just like reading words on a page. The first person to fill their page (or roll that magical star) wins!
Want your own Hats, Cats and Pumpkins Game? Throw your email into the box below and it will appear in your inbox as if by Halloween magic!
Want a Few More Fun Halloween Ideas?
- Halloween Classroom Party Ideas
- Halloween Word Search
- Halloween Joke Notes
- Halloween Learning Ideas
- Boo! It’s Halloween Ghost Bingo
- Cool Halloween Costumes for Kids
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What a great idea. My son would love this, I think. He loves counting, and we have a container of those glass beads that he really enjoys using. We usually use them on a mancala board, just fooling around, making patterns, counting, etc. but he likes games, so I am going to try printing or drawing some sheets like this. Thank you!
I just made a candy corn one of these for B.=) You can print it at http://activitymom.blogspot.com
Great way to incorporate math into an activity!
Yeah! Just this morning I was thinkging that I needed to make a Halloween themed grid game. Thanks for saving me the trouble!
I brought this to work with me one day (I'm a nanny). The 6 and 4 year old liked it so much that when their grandparents came over later (with ice cream!) all the kids could talk about was the game. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas with us!
We tried a similar game here, but it didn't work. I think she is too old to enjoy the manipulative aspect and too young to enjoy the winning aspect. What works well in our house is modified Chutes and Ladders where the winner gets chocolate in the end š
Friends–
Thank YOU for reading!
Glad it helped some and sorry it didn't work for RAHChild's kiddo–maybe another day?
:*)
amy
good idea-
i like using a deck of cards when you can't find dice –
that's a good one!!!!!!!
I was just making my christmas/birthday lists and need some advice. Son #1 will be 3 and son #2 will be 16months at Christmas. I want to mostly get them learning toys or books. I would LOVE, LOve, LoVe you to do a post or just email what you think some of the "must-have" gifts would be. Thanks
crystalboom at hotmail dot com
I just wanted to say that I thought it was a brilliant idea to use cards when you couldn't find dice. Sometimes I get so stuck on things like that – thinking we can't play without dice. Thanks for showing me another idea.
That's a great idea for the kiddies! Thank you for the lovely compliment you left on my blog! I deeply appreciate you. (:
What a GREAT idea!! I love this…and it's not too complex for my little ones. Thank you!
Very fun! Thank you for sharing your grids.
We made your math games and love them. I blogged about them here: http://mamabeefromthehive.blogspot.com/2009/10/fall-math-games.html
Love these! They are sooo festive!