What halloween crafts / art activities do the 5-7 year olds in your life enjoy doing?

October 24, 2009 8:46 AM

What Halloween crafts / art activities do the 5-8 year olds in your life enjoy doing?

I'm now in teacher's college and have been asked to deliver an art lesson with a Halloween theme for my Grade 1 and 2 split class (there are 20 kids total) next Friday. I am so stuck on what is a fun and educational thing for them to do, and the google search results are overwhelming!

I'd like the lesson to be finished in about 45 minutes, if that changes your answer!

Thanks :)

posted by nothingsconstant to Education (5 answers total)

Painting miniature pumpkins, and/or "dressing" them in costume with various accessories - googly eyes, feathers, pipe cleaners - always goes over well. Could you read them some kind of Halloween-themed story or poem and then let them have at the pumpkins freely? How "educational" is this activity supposed to be? Obviously kids are learning all the time, so I've always felt that every art project is a problem-solving opportunity, but you don't say if there are specific requirements to meet.

Or you could do a little unit about bats and then let them make their own. Bats are COOL. Mummies are neat, too - of course you could spend way more than 45 minutes on the subject of Egyptian mummification, but since these are young kids maybe a non-scary mummy story and then a chance to make their own little mummy dolls with toilet paper or crepe streamers would be fun.
posted by chihiro at 1:59 PM on October 24, 2009

Tell a scary story and let them illustrate it, have them draw the scariest monster they can imagine, make masks out of paper plates with eye-holes. Kids that age will get into almost any art project you can think of.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 3:22 PM on October 24, 2009

We would cut faces or pictures out of wax paper bags to make "jack-o-lanterns." I think we pasted orange paper on them to make them more authentic, but perhaps this makes them too opaque. Safer than carving, and at the end, you (or some other adult/parent) can either put tea lights in them or get Christmas lights and just put the bags in a line over those bulbs.
posted by bluefly at 8:24 PM on October 24, 2009

Get a big banner of paper and draw a winding road from one end to the other. Seed it with a few spooky buildings and tombstones, a rolling horizon and a moon in the sky. Then tell them you're making a Halloween neighborhood. Ask them if they can add things to it. Give them pens, watch them go at it.

While they draw, ask them about the parts they've drawn. Make notes on their stories. Then, when everyone is done, or the paper is full enough, walk with your fingers from one end of the banner to the other. Say you're a trick or treater. Tell the story of your evening, folding in all the stories the kids told.

If you have access to a recording device you can tell the story again, recording it this time while the kids make spooky noises to go with the story in the background.

I did this with 4th graders and a whiteboard, and the outcome was great.
posted by argybarg at 9:33 PM on October 24, 2009

Thanks everyone!
posted by nothingsconstant at 5:17 AM on October 27, 2009