Counting Hats, Cats and Pumpkins: Halloween Grid Game

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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