Little Blue Truck’s Halloween Circle Time

There are SO many great preschool read-alouds to choose from for Halloween, but one of my all-time favorites is Little Blue Truck’s Halloween! It’s a lift-the-flap book and has a truck and animals wearing costumes, so it’s pretty much a hit with everyone!

I printed off pictures of each animal from the book, did a Google-image search “eye mask clip art” and printed one off for each animal.  Tape the top of the mask to the top of the animal’s head so you can lift the mask and see who’s under it (just like the story).  I attached a blue truck to the side of a sensory bin, too.

As you read, have the kids guess which animal is under the mask before lifting the flap in the book, and then find that animal to put in the truck.  The kids LOVE lifting up the eye masks on the printable animals, too, and seeing the animals!

The black cat isn’t an animal that LBT picks up intentionally, but he sneaks on the truck and is on every page, so we sneak him in there, too, for an extra animal.

I have a felt blue truck basket from Easter last year at Target (I cut off the egg on both sides), so I used that for the end of the book.

Because we had 10 kids in the group, and only 8 animals, I had 2 kids pull off the towel together to reveal who the “ghost” was, so everyone could have a turn doing something with the book.

Extension activity:

Grab a little eye mask while all the costumes are out (Target has a bunch for $1 in the dollar spot!) and use your iPad to take a picture of each student wearing it.

Pull up the pictures 1 at a time and show them to the class and see if they can tell you WHO is under the mask. It’s a great activity for answering “WHO” questions and for learning their classmates’ names (bc I found a lot of them still don’t know everyone’s names yet even into October!)

The kids love seeing themselves on the screen!

Speech/Language Targets:
-WHO questions
-Halloween vocabulary
-Animal names
-Animal sounds (also great for speech if you have littles working on CV or CVCV syllables)
-Preposition “in”

Incorporating AAC:
Core vocabulary words to model: in, go in/get in, who, like (“I like this animal”)
PECS: If you’re at the phase where you’re working on “I hear” or “I see”, you can use “I see” to name the animals on each page
Big Mack switch: Program the repetitive line, “It’s me! It’s me!” onto the switch and have the student using the switch hit the button when that line comes up

Which Little Blue Truck book is your favorite? I love them all so it’s hard to choose! Let me know if you have any more fun things you do with this book!