Dear Reader,
It’s October! My Preschooler LiVeS for October. It has all her favorite things. Candy, costumes, and spooky things. Did I mention the candy? I don’t know where she gets the love of spooky things from, definitely NOT her mother.
I was pretty excited it was October, but for a totally different reason: Halloween activities! I’ve had a board on Pinterest for a while for all the fun things I’ve wanted to do with a kid for Halloween and they’ve always felt like a “someday” kind of project. But once again, spending intentional time with my children has another positive side effect. I get silly dopamine boosts for checking off an imaginary bucket list item. Said bucket list item 1? Silhouette painting.
The concept is really simple: Cut out a shape (I printed our ghost free printable at 25%, printed 2, and cut them out), and use masking tape (or painter’s tape, or double sided removable tape and tape your ghosts to a sheet of black construction paper. We used Masking tape and it worked better than I thought it would. Then hand your kid a Q-tip (cotton buds? Does anyone actually call them that as opposed to Q-tips? ) for each color of paint (multiple if your kid forgets and accidentally sticks it in the wrong color) and some paint on a plate (white is a given, but not a requirement) and tell them to paint anywhere they want! Make sure there is plenty of paint around the ghost, or he will not show up after the white paper is removed. Once they declare it “perfect,” let it dry and remove the ghosts!
This is a great activity for that Pincer Grasp we keep working on. I noticed she started off a bit shakey, but when I reminded her to use her “monster grip,” as her OT calls it, it got a lot more controlled. As you can see, our ghosts got quite the paint job, too. It doesn’t matter. Just let them paint. I DID, however, have to convince her to put paint along the outside of the ghost. She either wanted to pain him or the “negative” space, and it took multiple reminders to paint around the ghost outlines to have enough paint that it’d even make sense after the ghosts were removed.
