Kids love trick or treating at Halloween, but they also love doing creative arts and crafts projects. You can involve them in your Halloween celebrations and make Halloween decorations that are fun and kid friendly. Here’s how:
Carve a Pumpkin
This is classic Halloween fun. It starts when you let the kids help you select a pumpkin that is good for carving.
Don’t let a young child carve a pumpkin, but let older children carve with supervision and age-appropriate carving tools.
Keep your child out of harm’s way when you’re carving by giving them their own pumpkin that they can decorate themselves, with glitter or other kid-friendly decorations.
Create Spiders
Find black paper plates and tape four pipe cleaners to each side of the plate to make eight legs. Bend the pipe cleaner ends to look like feet. Give them character with googly eyes and candy corn fangs.
Decorative Apple Stamps
You’ll need an apple, cut down the centre, orange paint, a small paint brush, googly eyes and brown and green pipe cleaners.
Cut your apple down the centre, and dab orange paint on the apple half with a paint brush. Press that apple down on paper to stamp out a pumpkin shape. Let dry. Cut the brown pipe cleaners into stem size and twist the green pipe cleaners around a pencil to make a curly leaf. Add the googly eyes, and you have cute pumpkin faces!
Paper Bats
You’ll need black paper, scissors, glue, and googly eyes.
Cut paper strips along the width of a regular sheet of paper, about an inch wide (there is no need for precision). You’ll need four paper strips per bat.
Gently fold the paper strips in half.
Glue two paper strips together, at a right angle, to make a cross shape.
Glue the other two paper strips on top of the first two, distributing them evenly in a snowflake shape. Then, glue the paper strips together on the top.
Fold a piece of black paper in half and draw a wing shape on the paper (so you can cut two wings at once).
Fold at the end, and apply glue to that fold, and stick it onto the black paper ball you made.
Stick on the googly eyes.
There’s your bat! You can string the bats together to make a garland, or just hang them individually from the ceiling to make your home spookier.
Marshmallow Ghosts
You’ll need white paint, a bowl or plate to hold the paint, black construction paper, square marshmallows (regular will do), a straw, a toothpick and kitchen shears.
Snip the marshmallow into a ghost shape with the shears. Push the straw all the way through the marshmallow for eyes. Make two holes very close together with the straw for a mouth.
Pour the white paint into a plate or bowl. Press the toothpick into the back of the ghost stamp to make a handle. Press the marshmallow into the white paint, then onto the black paper, for a perfect ghost stamp.
Have fun!
