Easy Halloween Activity for Toddlers - a Magnetic Shapes Kit to Make

For long car rides, religious ceremonies or other times when we need our kiddos to be content and QUIET, a cookie sheet and magnetic activities can work wonders!

In October, I made my daughters large cardboard pumpkins and gave them an assortment of facial features so that they could create their own pumpkins.  I made some facial features out of construction paper and intended to make more out of felt… until I found premade ones in the dollar bins at Target!  Simply stick magnets on the back of each piece and you’re DONE!

(I used sticker magnets that come in a roll at JoAnn Fabrics.)

Is it me... or does my daughter have the SAME expression as the pumpkin?

For my 19-month-old, I gave her just a few facial features and she had a great time arranging them on her cardboard pumpkin face.  For my 3-year-old, I gave her a bag  full of numerous facial features, scars, hats, etc.  She played, rearranged, covered the pumpkin in as many as possible, and had a grand time!

Editor’s Note: This activity could also be accomplished by printing out shapes and other Halloween designs on magnetic printer paper, or by printing them on regular paper and using thin magnetic adhesive sheets. Might we suggest using some of our awesome free printables for this? Try our Halloween jointed paper doll toys or this set of Halloween shape templates!

How to make milk jug Halloween ghost luminaries

I’ve seen this craft around a few places and was so excited to try it, especially since I was recently given an old set of Christmas lights.  We have ours glowing away on the piano, but a whole line of these ghosts would be adorable on the porch for Halloween night.

What you need to make this recycled Halloween craft:

• Plastic milk jugs
• Christmas lights
• Permanent marker
• Scissors

Just a few items are needed to make these glowing Halloween ghosts.

Rinse your milk jugs and peel off the labels. It's better to do this in advance so they're dry when you work with them.

Have fun drawing silly and spooky faces on your Halloween ghosts.

Cut holes in the sides of your milk jugs so you can string the Christmas lights through them and have them sit side-by-side.

Feed the Christmas lights through the holes, making sure to bunch up plenty of lights in each milk jug.

Line up the milk jugs, plug in the Christmas lights, and admire your awesome Halloween Craft!

Who doesn't love a giant brain-sucking spider on top of their head?!

These days, my little one is into all things animal related.  If I didn’t know better than to predict these things at age four, I’d say she was going to be a biologist when she grows up.  We recently went through a fascination with bugs, and being the mama I am, I found ways to bring that into our kids’ crafts.  Here’s one of our spider crafts.  This would be great as  Halloween craft, of course, but we don’t wait around for stuff like that here!

This one is particularly nice because it’s a super quick craft that doesn’t take anything special to make.

What You Need to Make a Spider Headband Craft for Kids:

• Black Construction Paper
• Scissors
• Tape
• Googly Eyes
• Pipe Cleaner (optional, Dot decided her spider needed a mouth)

The spider headband takes craft supplies you probably already have on hand.

Cut eight strips of black construction paper to make your spider's legs. We made them one inch wide and as long as the length of our construction paper. Cut two additional strips about two inches wide for the headband.

Tape the 2" bands together along the ends and use them to measure around your kid's head to make the headband the right size.

Fold each of the construction paper legs about an inch from one end.

Tape the legs on the inside of the headband so that they hang over the edge where they were folded. Put four on the left and four on the right so the legs will hang down one either side of your kid's face. (Creepy, right?!)

Add some googly eyes to your spider headband craft to give him some personality.

How to Make a Halloween Paper Bag Pumpkin Craft

This pumpkin craft could work great as a goody bag for a Halloween party, although we just used ours as decoration around the house.  It wasn’t too complex, but it was pretty messy, as you have to paint the inside of the bag.

What you need to make a paper bag pumpkin:

• Paper bag
• Orange paint
• Green paint
• Paintbrush
• Newspaper
• Curling ribbon (or raffia)
• Scrap of brown construction paper

Materials for a paper bag pumpkin autumn craft.

Paint the bottom 3/4 of the paper bag orange for your pumpkin.

Paint the top quarter of the paper bag green, both on the outside and the inside.

If you're just making a pumpkin decoration, stuff the paper bag with newspaper. You could also make it a Halloween treat bag by filling it with candy or other goodies. Tie off the top with green ribbon or raffia.

Cut the top into approximately 1/2" sections and bend them down to make pumpkin leaves.

Finish your pumpkin craft by rolling up a piece of brown construction paper and inserting it into the top for a stem. Then curl the ribbons for vines.

What I Learned the Hard Way:  The painting got pretty messy, and it took quite a while for the bag to dry; so it’s not the best craft for toddlers.

Spooky skeleton craft for kids to make at Halloween

This Halloween skeleton craft is really easy, and if you’re willing to let go of control, even the toddlers can make their own.

Related Pages: Halloween Paper Doll Toys (with a skeleton) and a printable Halloween skeleton mask.

What You Need to Make a Q-Tip Skeleton Craft for Halloween

• Q-Tips
• Scissors
• Black construction paper
• White paper
• Glue
• Marker (not pictured)

Q-Tip Skeleton Craft Supplies

Freehand draw some skulls on your white paper, or print some off from clip art.

Cut out a skull and glue it toward the top of your paper. You will build your skeleton under this.

I found that it works best for this Halloween craft if you do the ribs first and then glue the spine over the top. We just used a dot of glue on each end of the Q-Tip.

Cut Q-Tips as needed for your skeleton's fingers and feet.

As you can see, we were all able to get into this craft:

Age 2

Age 4

We’ll just leave my age out of it, okay? ;-)

Wouldn't these mummy luminaries look great lining the walk for trick-or-treaters on Halloween?

I’m always torn on Halloween on whether I should turn the porch light on for safety or keep it off to add to the creepiness of our decorations.  This year, we might just go with a whole bunch of Halloween luminaries, including these cute mummies.  I happened to have some cheesecloth left over from making jelly, but you could use white fabric scraps or tissue paper if you really just needed a project to fill the time!

What You Need to Make Halloween Mummy Luminaries

• Empty jar
• Cheesecloth (or other white material)
• Googly eyes
• Paintbrush
• White Glue

Craft supplies needed to make mummy luminaries for Halloween.

Cut your cheesecloth into strips. We attached ours by mixing white glue and water and then brushing it on as we wrapped the jar.

Glue on some googly eyes so your mummy can see!

Let your craft project dry and add in a tea light. We used the LED lights.

 Also, if you’re into Halloween mummies, Fantasy Jr has a cute mummy paper toy to print!

What You Need to Make a Glitter and Glue Spiderweb for Halloween

• Plastic Wrap or Wax Paper
• Marker
• Glue
• Glitter

Halloween Spider Web Craft Supplies

Lay out a piece of plastic wrap and draw a spider web on it with your marker. See, it already feels Halloween-y, doesn't it?

Trace the lines of your spider web with white glue. You want the lines of glue to be a little thick so that your web doesn't break later.

Cover your glue spider web with glitter. Silver works great!

Let your spider web dry and then shake off the excess glitter. (We put ours back in the bottle to reuse for other kids crafts.)

This is the best part of this Halloween craft! Carefully peel the whole thing off of the plastic wrap.

Seriously, how cool is that?!

By the way, if you use the Press-n-Seal stuff, you can put it up on a window ahead of time to draw out a spider web that will fit the space.

Add a touch of fall with this simple autumn leaf garland.

All of the credit for this autumn garland idea goes to Elise at A Beautiful Mess Blog.  As a  writer, I had to find just the right word to describe it after I fell in love with a picture of the garland she made.  I was trying to combine “beautiful” and “whimsical,” and that just didn’t quite sum it up for me.  Finally, the perfect word came to me:  ”charming.”  This craft is so charming!

What you need to make an autumn leaf garland (sorry, I don’t have a picture of all the craft supplies for this one):

• Felt in various autumn colors
• Yarn
• Needle
• Optional – use our printable leaf pattern stencils

I cut out a cardstock template so my leaves would all match.

Cut out your felt leaves.

String the felt leaves onto your yarn making sure that your stitches are somewhat even.

Decorate for fall with your autumn leaf garland!

Melting pony beads is obviously something that needs adult supervision. You can do it in your oven, but I saw a tip somewhere that this method makes for a very unpleasant-smelling kitchen. I’m not a fan of making my kids breathe plastic fumes, so we did this project and melted them outside on our gas grill! It worked perfectly!

Make pretty Halloween suncatchers by melting pony beads into baking pans!

What You Need to Make This Halloween Suncatcher Craft

• Colored plastic pony beads
• Baking pans (I used two 9″ round cake pans, but you can use any metal pan, including cupcake pans)
• Drill (To hang it)
• String or metallic plastic foil shreds (Found at the dollar store or in the gift wrapping section of a department store)

How to Make Halloween Suncatchers

This project can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I wanted to push my creative skills to make the owl suncatcher – my daughter wasn’t so ambitious and wanted to make a pumpkin face. For an even easier project, you could simply dump black and orange beads into a pan and melt them as they landed! We didn’t take pictures of the ones we did like that, but they also turned out well.

It takes longer than you think it would to arrange the beads into your pans if you want to create an image. You can see how we put together the pumpkin face in this picture:

Pumpkin Suncatcher Craft Tutorial

Notice that we made sure that all the beads were not on their sides and laying in the same direction? This was not necessary, as we found out after the beads had melted. Plus it was tedious – so you can simply arrange your beads in your pans and need not worry about whether they lay on their sides or with the bead hole down.

The owl took a while, but that was also made (MUCH)  longer by the unnecessary bead turning:

Owl Suncatcher Craft

I wanted to create a color chart to replicate the owl, but I realized that since not everyone has the same size pan, nor will find the same beads we found, that an exact chart would only work for a small portion of our readers. So I’ve created a printable ‘guide’ if you will, which gives you a general idea of where to place the colors, but is definitely NOT an exact placement chart:

Owl Color Graph Chart for Halloween Suncatchers - Click for full page printable picture

Once you have your baking pans loaded up with beads, pre-heat your grill and get it to a regular cooking temperature. The temp isn’t an exact science, we just put our grill on ‘medium’.

Have an adult CAREFULLY place your pans onto the cooking grates, don’t forget the potholders! Plus, too much movement will ruin your designs, so don’t jostle them while moving them.

I checked our suncatchers after 10 minutes and at 15 minutes, but found that 20 minutes was about right for these beads. This is again not an exact science, because we found that the opaque beads melted at a different rate than the clear colored beads did. So you’ll just have to keep an eye on them and simply take them off the grill when they are fully melted.

Allow them to cool someplace where little hands cannot get to them. You’ll find that as the plastic cools, it shrinks just enough to pop itself right out of the pan. If by some reason you have any plastic residue on your pan, it is easily scraped off with something like a spatula or a credit card if you don’t want to scratch the surface.

Once they are completely cooled off (which doesn’t take very long at all – about 20 minutes), you can use a drill to make holes in the top and/or bottom of the circles to hang them outside:

Drilling holes in the suncatchers to hang them.

Then hang them outside and enjoy ‘em!

Pretty Halloween Suncatchers that Kids Can Make

Related Pages: Recycled Box Aliens, Printable Monster Masks

What You Need to Make Recycled Tissue Box Monsters:

• Tissue Box
• Egg Carton
• White Glue
• White Paper (or craft foam)
• Scissors
• Pipe Cleaner
• Googly Eyes
• Hot Glue (optional, but recommended)

Pretty simple supplies are all you need for this recycled craft.

Cut the opening in your tissue box so that it reaches all the way to the top on one side.

Cut out two rows of jagged monster teeth from white construction paper or craft foam. (Craft foam will hold up way better.)

Add glue to the sides for the top row of monster teeth and to the sides and long edge for the bottom row. I also reinforced my top row with a couple of pieces of transparent tape once I set them in.

Cut out egg carton cups and glue googly eyes onto the bottoms. Your monster craft can have as many eyes as you want!

Glue the egg cups to the top of your boogie monster. I chose to use hot glue because it held them in place better.

Poke some holes in the top of your recycled tissue box, behind the eyes. Again, you can give your monster as many antennas as you'd like. I went with two, but the little one insisted on five (to match the number of eyes she'd insisted on earlier, of course!)

Feed your pipe cleaners through the holes, and your boogie monster now has antennas, or hair, or tentacles...

What I Learned the Hard Way:  I originally found this idea through someone else who found it at Giggles Galore, where Mariah calls them Tattle Monsters.  She used white craft foam, and it would be a lot easier to work with.  As you can see, our teeth ripped before we were even done making our craft.  If you’re like me, though, and are stubborn enough to just use what you have on hand, I’d recommend doing the antennas before gluing in the teeth.