Preparing For An October/Halloween My Obstacle Course | My Obstacle Course: Engage, Encourage and Empower

Today I am sharing an example of what it looked like when I was preparing for an October/Halloween themed My Obstacle Course done with Andrew.

Prepping for an October/Halloween Themed My Obstacle Course

Below is a photograph of my desk while I got organized. This is how I play!! While it may seem to be just a mish-mash of things, they all went together beautifully to create a fun learning experience.

P1000074 — Prepping by gathering materials to see what I have.

I gathered cutouts, stickers, thematic materials and other tools that I had which would help me build skills. I’ll do my best to go from left to right describing the item and how I used it. (I will be posting the ones I haven’t published yet in the next two weeks.)

Yellow Geoboard with rubber bands to build fine motor skills while creating a spider.
Colored cups (leftover from Easter egg dying) with Halloween rings used for sorting and counting.
Alphabet stamps and stamp pad to build fine motor skills while spelling words to go with our theme.
Write on – wipe off alphabet writing book with dry-erase markers to help with letter formation.
Leaf cutouts to make opposite matching game.
Halloween stickers for patterning activity, “What Comes Next?”
Autumn themed number cards to play, “Make This Number.”
Some counting activities from www.EnchantedLearning.com (the white papers with black background).
Farm themed memory match game.

Note: These nine activities actually got broken up into about 13 stations since I consider things like sorting and then counting to be separate stations and I also usually separate patterning into two stations using different stickers or different patterns. I’ve had people say that they could never set up that many stations but once you look at it like this, it is not that difficult.

After this, I gather up the larger items like tunnels, carpet runner, balls, clothesline and clothespins. It only takes a little while to set up because I use the same station locations each time so I just have to scatter the activities so I have a good mix of skills and also plan to put preferred activities after activities that are more challenging. This helps to motivate him to finish so he can move on.

With some really simple materials, you can create an engaging experience with your child that will provide you with so much information about how they learn and what they know and can do while your child gets to build the skills that they are ready for at the level they need.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!