5 Easy Halloween Crafts Your Grandkids Can Make
Celebrate the creepiest time of year with these five easy DIY Halloween crafts for kids using items you probably already have lying around your home.
Spooky Paper Bat
This easy DIY fall craft is perfect for little hands. Using a recycled toilet paper or paper towel roll as a base, wrap the roll in black construction paper. Fold the top together for ears, cut out and attach construction paper wings and add googly eyes to complete the monstrous look.
Fun fact to share as you craft: Even though bats aren’t actually blind, they do often use their ears to see at night with echolocation, reflecting sound to locate objects. Bats create sounds at frequencies over 100,000 waves per second — much higher than the human ear can comprehend.
Pumpkin Lantern
Save a couple of jars from your favourite pasta sauce and create a set of colourful pumpkin lanterns. (If you plan to make the real thing, check out these 10 tricks for your best jack-o’-lanterns ever.)
Cut tissue paper into 1-in. x 1-in. squares. Usually, one sheet of tissue paper is more than enough for a single jar. Use a paintbrush to cover the entire jar with a thin layer of Modge Podge. Attach the tissue paper squares in an overlapping pattern. Once the tissue paper covers the whole jar, seal the edges with another layer of Modge Podge and wrap a green pipe cleaner around the top of the jar.
To create a jack-o-lantern lantern, cut out a mouth, nose and eyes from black construction paper and glue them on. Finally, place a small battery-operated, flameless LED candle inside.
Fun fact to share as you craft: The term jack-o-lantern was once a description for a night watchman, walking the streets with his lantern. Learn more about the fascinating history of jack-o’-lanterns. Hint: People didn’t used to carve pumpkins!
Lollipop Ghost
Coffee filters are perfectly cut and shaped to make the spookiest Halloween ghosts. Place a lollipop in the center of two filters and pull the edges around, twisting at the base of the candy. Tie the neck of the ghost with a black ribbon and create the face with the help of a marker and/or googly eyes. Ruffle the edges of the coffee filter to give your ghost a little terrifying detail.
Fun fact to share as you craft: To achieve the look of a spectral haunting, special-effects artists use a technique established in the late 1800s known as Pepper’s Ghost: Reflecting an image off a mirror into a transparent sheet of acrylic to create the appearance of a spirit. This trick is how Disney’s Haunted Mansion fills a ballroom with ghostly dancers.
Can’t get enough of the supernatural? Read these five famous ghost stories that have been debunked.
Frankenstein’s Puppet
Any mad scientists in your home will love making this Frankenstein puppet, and perhaps a few scary friends, to act out some spooky monster scenes.
Using a paper lunch bag as a pattern, cut green construction paper into two rectangles, matching the bottom of the folded sack and the entire side that the bottom folds upon. Using a glue stick, attach the green paper to the bag. With black and white paper, cut out details such as eyes, bolts and teeth to compete your paper bag monster’s look.
Fun fact to share as you craft: Though people often call the hulking monster with the green face Frankenstein, this was actually the last name of the doctor who created the monster, in the famous book by Mary Shelley. (The monster created by Dr. Frankenstein never received a proper name.) Here’s where you can watch Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the best scary movies on Netflix Canada right now.
Try out these 20 corny Halloween jokes that anyone can remember.
Yarn Monster
Scare away the things that go bump in the night with a friendly yarn monster.
Wrap yarn around a small piece of cardboard (approximately three inches wide) 50 times. Cut the end and carefully remove the cardboard. Tie a second piece of yarn tightly around the middle of the yarn bundle, then cut the looped edges. Flair out the yarn to make it look the way you like. Accent with googly eyes and looped pipe-cleaner arms, carefully tucked through the center of the yarn ball. You can make cat toys out of yarn, too. (Here are eight more fun crafts to make with your kids.)
Fun fact to share as you craft: Before moving to Sesame Street, Cookie Monster was born in Canada. Jim Henson initially created him for a General Foods Canada commercial, during which he gobbled up not cookies, but snack crackers.
Next, we asked an expert if it’s safe to go trick-or-treating during the COVID-19 pandemic.
