Enjoy the holidays with some very cool and not-so-scary Halloween sensory ideas. Our favorite Halloween sensory activities for toddlers to preschoolers include sensory bins, slime (especially taste-safe slime), messy play, calm-down jars, play dough, and more. We love easy-to-use sensory activities for young kids!
Sensory Friendly Halloween Activities
Halloween can be such a fun and novel holiday for young children. It certainly doesn’t have to be scary or frightening but it can be a little creepy, crawly and filled with silly sensory play and a little bit of learning too!
Halloween sensory play also doesn’t have to be hard to set up or expensive either. I love the dollar store for seasonal sensory items.
Tip: When the holiday is done, I store items in a zip lock bag and place in a plastic bin for next year
I love sensory play for my son and he loves all the hands-on fun! Read all about why sensory play and especially why sensory bins are important! Tactile sensory play is perfect for young kids!
Sensory activities don’t have to be difficult to set up and you will find these Halloween activities use common kitchen pantry ingredients. Let’s get your kids set up for some fun sensory playtime for the holidays!
Why is Sensory Play Important?
Sensory play makes for awesome hands-on fun and learning for young children as they explore and discover more about the world through their senses! Sensory activities can also calm a child, help a child to focus, and engage a child.
The Many Benefits of Sensory Play:
Motor Development Skills ~ Sensory play helps a child explore, discover, and create using motor skills like dumping, filling, and scooping.
Play Skills {emotional development} ~ For both social play and independent play, sensory activities allow children to play cooperatively or side by side. My son has had many positive experiences with other children over a bin of rice!
Language Development ~ Sensory play increases language development by experiencing all there is to see and do with their hands, which leads to great conversations and opportunities to model language.
Using the 5 Senses ~ Many sensory activities include a few of the senses! Touch, sight, sounds, taste, (where appropriate), and smell are the 5 senses. Kids can experience several senses at a time with a sensory bin or sensory play recipe. Check out our list of 5 senses activities.
For example, imagine a bin of brightly colored rainbow rice: touch the loose grains against the skin, see the vivid colors as they mix together, and hear the sound of sprinkling over a plastic container or shaken in a plastic egg!
Calming tools ~ Sensory play recipes calm many anxious or worried kiddos. You might find that one works better than another for your kiddo.
Some sensory play materials can settle and soothe, and some can help keep kids’ attention and connection with you. Download the free calming activities poster here.
Helpful Sensory Resources To Get You Started
- Sensory Bottles You Can Make
- The Best Sensory Bin Ideas
- 10 Best Sensory Bin Fillers
- Playdough Activities
- Printable Playdough Mats
- Tactile Sensory Activities
Halloween Sensory Activities For Toddlers
Here are some additional Halloween sensory activities for toddlers that require little to no preparation.
1. Pumpkin Sensory Play: Give your toddler a small pumpkin to explore in a small bin. Let them touch the pumpkin’s bumpy surface and draw on it with washable markers or paint. Set up a soapy water bin after and let them wash the pumpkin!
2. Spooky Sensory Bin: Fill a plastic bin with uncooked rice or pasta and hide small Halloween-themed toys or objects. Let your toddler dig and search for hidden treasures.
3. Ghostly Sensory Bag: Fill a resealable plastic bag with white hair gel and add googly eyes to create a ghostly sensory bag. See our pumpkin squish bag.
4. Wizard’s Brew: Easy water play! Fill a container with water and add some green food coloring. Let your toddler stir the brew with a plastic spoon and add plastic spiders or other creepy crawlies.
5. Mummy Wrap: Use toilet paper or white streamers to wrap your toddler up like a mummy. They can pretend to be a spooky mummy and unravel themselves later for lots of giggles.
6. Gross Halloween: Fill a bowl with cooked, cooled spaghetti and tell your toddler they’re “intestines or brains.” Encourage them to squish and squeeze the spaghetti! You can even color it to make it more fun. See our rainbow spaghetti.
7. Sensory Storytime: Read a Halloween-themed book with tactile elements like fuzzy bats or scratch-and-sniff pages. Engaging their sense of touch while reading adds an extra sensory dimension.
Click below for your FREE Halloween Activities!
Easy Halloween Sensory Activities
Click the link for each Halloween sensory activity below for the full supply list and set up.
Pumpkin Squish Bag
Keep it mess-free with a pumpkin sensory bag or squish bag filled with pumpkin guts!
Halloween Bubbling Brew
Baking soda and vinegar and sensory play is the perfect mix of sensory and science play for young kids and Halloween fizzy brew is so much fun!
Halloween Glitter Jars
Calming glitter jars take very little time to make but offer numerous lasting benefits for your kids. Halloween sensory activities are a hit for kids of all ages, and these sensory jars make a great calm-down tool with their mesmerizing Halloween theme sparkle!
Halloween Sensory Bins
Three different Halloween sensory bins to try; choose your filling!
Halloween Slime
Goopy, fluffy, stretchy, oozy, creepy are some of my son’s favorite ways to describe our awesome homemade slime recipes, and what better time to make slime than for Halloween?
Halloween Sensory Balloons
Make your own Halloween stress balls from balloons and a variety of fillings. So much fun for squeezing and squishing!
Ghost Peeps – Taste Safe Slime Dough!
Ghostly Peeps slime is an excellent Halloween activity for kids of multiple ages since it combines science and sensory play into one fantastic activity. Everyone will enjoy the experience and it is taste-safe!
Halloween Playdough
There are many fun ways to enjoy Halloween with kids, including Halloween playdough ideas! Keep it simple by creating a monster-making playdough tray that will be perfect to take out all month! Make a batch of our favorite no cook playdough and add easy craft or dollar store Halloween items.
Try our Roll-a-Skeleton Playdough Mat or our Picasso pumpkins!
Spidery Oobleck
Oobleck is a fun sensory activity made from two easy ingredients. Add in some plastic spiders and tweezers for practice with fine motor skills.
Gelatin Heart Sensory Play
A little creepy but fun! Make a gelatin heart for spooky sensory science play!
Spooky Melting Ice Activity
Your kids will think this is the coolest thing ever! This Halloween melting ice activity is a hit for any holiday or season or for no reason at all. Find more melting ice activities here.
Printable Halloween STEM Activities Pack
150+ Pages of Halloween-themed materials!
This Halloween project pack is suitable for home, school, and group use for kids in grades Kindergarten through elementary but is scaleable for many ages and abilities.
What’s Included:
- 25+ Halloween theme science and STEM activities with printable sheets, instructions, and helpful information all using easy-to-source materials perfect for limited-time needs. Includes a Halloween engineering pack with fun, problem-based challenges for kids to solve!
- The skeleton activity pack includes building a skeleton challenge and a coding challenge! Try a skeleton bone bridge-building STEM challenge!
- Halloween theme brick printable activities for hands-on learning with math that is perfect for early finishers or home fun and reinforces basic math concepts.
- Bonus fun pack includes games and activities to round out your Halloween theme, such as I Spy, bingo, matching, Would You Rather cards, scavenger hunt, word search, A-Z Halloween hunt, and a coloring page.
- The Halloween STEAM Pack includes artist-inspired projects by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and more!
