Give your students a playful scare by filling your sensory table with feeler boxes. Using shoe boxes with kid hand sized holes in the side, create these boxes. Label these boxes with the name of a different yucky substance it purportedly contains, such as “eyeballs” then fill the box with an item that feels similar to that item, in this case, peeled grapes. For young students, simply allow them to feel and enjoy the textures. For older ones, ask them to guess what the items in the boxes actually are.
Engage your students in some pumpkin themed experimentation as a Halloween science craft. Ask students what they think they could do to a pumpkin to preserve it, creating a list of their suggestions. Next, purchase a pumpkin and cut it into petite pieces. Place each piece in a bowl and cover it with the whatever substance students thought may preserve it, covering one pumpkin piece with water, another with salt and so forth. Each day, ask students to visit the table and take notes on which pumpkin pieces look best preserved.
Let your students play in the sand in a spider themed hunt. Fill your sensory table with sand. Within the sand, nestle plastic spiders. Ask students to dig around in the sand, seeking out the spiders. Mix in some math by asking them to count the spiders, or make the activity a purely playful one, giving students time to search and recording how many spiders each student finds in a set amount of time.
Allow your students to get crafty at your sensory table by engaging them in the creation of fuzzy masks. Fill your table with an assortment of soft items, such as faux fur and cotton balls. Also place paper cut into the shape of masks with elastic attached. Allow the students to use the fuzzy components to create masks they can don as Halloween approaches.