Leave it our household to turn everything into an animal related activity. On account of World Animal Day, we did a Halloween+animal combination activity today.

It’s Halloween season and on cue we are painting pumpkins after school in our patio. It is weird to be painting pumpkins in the hot sun here in L.A. It is too hot to go to the park and the sun is out all.the.time. Now that I got that out of the way, here is how we made some pretty cool animal pumpkins.

We got some white and baby orange pumpkins and sat to paint with acrylics.

Baby A and I started painting the white pump kin orange – I know. Well, that’s the color she wanted.

With orange paint on her face, she was a girl on a mission with orange paint.

Big A kept giggling calling her “You are a cheetah with orange tear marks” That’s my animal trivia loving pre schooler.

Once the obligatory glitter was dumped on the orange guy’s head we set it dry.

Next step is to turn into a tiger. Big A took a stab at painting fine black lines for stripes.

Tada! Tiger Pumpkin

We had to observe up close with a magnifying glass

Big A learned some patterns while making giraffe pumpkins with yellow-brown patterns.

Mommy was forcefully given a turn with a zebra pumpkin.

Next day, for our rainbow pumpkin I had prepped my white pumpkin with painters tape. Unfortunately Big A’s listening skills took a nose dive while she insisted that she want to use kids paint to paint on them.  She went on to say that she needed to SEE how the paint will flake off.

We did that and here is the result just after the painting session.

I do want to say that kids paint (any water based paint)will flake off the pumpkin once dried.  For what’s worth, both of them had fun peeling of the paint while learning a valuable lesson “Mommy knows best”!

That’s our Halloween based animal activity and with this we wrap up our World Animal Day series. I know that I only did one animal post every three days. Note to self : Please take, sick kids, sick mom, and unexpected visitors into account before committing.

For World Animal Day 2012 to show our support and love for animals we adopted an animal – a sea-horse. Every time we visit an aquarium I think of adopting an animal but it doesn’t happen. Today is the perfect day to it. The adoption is pretty much a donation which goes towards conservancy programs , animal rehabilitation programs, animal habitat programs.

Since Big A has natural affinity towards anything wildlife, I really did not have to teach or show her that she needs to respect and love them. However, the only simple thing we are working on is “destroying spider webs”. It may be a very simple act, but teaching the kids not to destroy a spider’s web or crush a snail’s shell is the first step to teach them respect .

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Please stop by Angelique Felix for the final wrap up