🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🌈 Sensory Exploration — Safe exploration of varied textures, temperatures, and materials helps children build a rich sensory map of the world and supports self-regulation in children with sensory processing differences.
• 🧩 Problem Solving — Working through a challenge — figuring out how pieces fit, how to balance a stack, or how to make something work — develops the perseverance and logical reasoning skills children use across every learning domain.
• 🤝 Social Skills — Activities done with others — siblings, classmates, or parents — teach children how to take turns, negotiate, collaborate, and read social cues that form the basis of healthy relationships.
• 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Thinking about how objects relate in space — fitting shapes together, building structures, filling containers — develops the spatial intelligence that predicts success in mathematics and STEM fields.

By Julie Pirkle

Halloween wouldn’t be complete without a monster of a feast. Serve up a touch and feel silly monster buffet for your preschooler and his/her friends. This Halloween food activity will elicit squeals and giggles as preschoolers touch and feel silly monster parts that can be found in mom’s kitchen, and try and guess what each one really is. Silly monster teeth, silly monster eyeballs and silly monster fur are just a few of the delectable treats on this Halloween menu!

What You Will Need

Paper Bowls

Wet Wipes

Blindfold (One for each participant)

Half a Package of Cooked Spaghetti

Six Hard Boiled Egg Yolks

One Package of Jello, prepared

One Package of Cotton Candy

Small Package of Raw Mini Carrots

One Package of Candy Corn

½ Cup V-8 Juice

¼ Peanut Butter

Touch and Feel Silly Monster Buffet Prep

Step 1:

Prepare your touch and feel silly monster buffet. Put the cooked spaghetti into a paper bowl. Repeat with each food item.

Step 2:

Arrange and/or decorate your touch and feel silly monster buffet table.

What to Do

Step 1:

Blindfold the preschoolers who will be participating in the silly monster buffet activity. Be sure they don’t see the buffet table beforehand.

Tip: To keep your touch and feel silly monster buffet activity “entrees” secret, cover each individual bowl with a paper towel.

Step 2:

Position preschoolers in a single line in front of the buffet table.

Step 3:

Bring out the first entrée. Pass around the bowl of cooked spaghetti and have each preschooler feel it. As you pass the bowl around, tell preschoolers they’re touching silly monster brains.

Step 4:

The hard boiled egg yolks, or should we say silly monster eyeballs, are next. Give each preschooler a turn to feel the yolks.

Step 5:

Repeat step three, and serve the third dish on the menu, Jello, also known as silly monster slime.

Step 6:

The next course is silly monster fur or cotton candy.

Step 7:

Pass around the bowl of raw carrots so preschoolers can touch and feel stubby silly monster fingers and toes.

Step 8:

What do silly monster teeth feel like? Pass around the bowl of candy corn and let each preschooler find out.

Step 9:

Silly monster spit is next. Instruct each preschooler to stick a finger in the V-8 juice.

Step 10:

Last but not least, serve up some silly monster ear wax. Give each preschooler a turn sticking his/her fingers into the bowl of peanut butter.

Tip: At the end of your last course, pass around wet wipes to each preschooler for easy cleanup of hands.

Step 11:

Now that the touch and feel part of the silly monster buffet is complete, play a quick guessing game before the blindfolds are removed. See if any of the preschoolers can figure out what food was actually in each bowl.

Step 12:

It’s time to see for themselves. Instruct preschoolers to remove their blindfolds and have a look, and maybe another feel, at each silly monster buffet item. As they look at the foods, remind them what silly monster part each food was supposed to be.

Step 13:

If they want, let preschoolers have a taste of the silly monster buffet treats.

Bon Appetite!