Cheap and Easy Halloween Projects for Kids

Planning a Halloween party, need to know how to entertain a roomful of little boys and ghouls, or just want to have some cheap Halloween fun with your kids? Try these cheap and fun Halloween projects guaranteed to keep your kids busy all afternoon.

Painting a Halloween Pumpkin
Painting Halloween pumpkins is a great Halloween project for younger children who are too little to carve out pumpkins. A little bit of paint and some imagination makes for some scary decorations and fun memories.

You can buy a set of colorful squash and/or pumpkins from your local grocery store, farmer's market, or even from your own vegetable patch. Even some department stores have large bins of pumpkins and various squash at this time of year. If you are going to decorate the outside of your house, be sure to buy outdoor paint from your local craft store. If you are planning on keeping the pumpkins indoors, you can paint them with washable tempura paint and use fun art extras like glitter, sequins, and even glow-in-the-dark paint.

Have the children make stencils of various Halloween pumpkin mouths, eyes, and ears using card stock paper. If there are lots of pumpkins, the kids can mix and match noses, freakish grins, and spooky eyes. Trace the stencils with a permanent marker, and then paint the pumpkins. Add accessories like witch hats or decorate with ribbons and glitter.

Halloween Cupcake Party
For a Halloween project that is loads of fun and delicious, have a Halloween cupcake party. Before the party, bake batches of cupcakes. To make them interesting, add food coloring to vanilla cupcakes to make fun orange, red, and green cupcakes. Have several different types of frosting colors for decorating. Make little signs with fun names like "Scary Slimy Frosting", "Vampire Frosting", or "Frankenstein's Favorite Frosting".

Encourage each child to bring a bag of their favorite ghoulish Halloween candy or cupcake decorations. Everything from candy corn to gummy spiders to freaky slime ball eyes can be used to decorate the cupcakes. Offer a prize for the scariest cupcake. Take lots of fun pictures before the cupcakes are eaten.

For healthier version, you can make whole grain pumpkin muffins and top them with low fat cream cheese frosting. Offer yogurt covered raisins, sugar free gummy worms, and other options in addition to the usual sugary fare.

Halloween Puppets
For this fun project, you only need scrap paper, glue, scissors, and paper lunch bags. Scrounge around your home or classroom for extra fabric scraps, yarn, ribbons, stickers, googly eyes, glitter, old stamps, and anything that can be glued onto the paper bag.

Slip your hand into the paper bag, using the fold as the mouth. Show the children where to place the eyes and mouth for their puppet. For the Halloween twist, add vampire or werewolf fangs to the mouth, maybe a witch hat made out of paper scraps, glow in the dark gel for a ghost, or even tons of eyes for a freaky eyeball monster. Encourage the children to decorate the body of the puppet, even gluing arms and legs to the bag. Brainstorm what type of accessories the Halloween puppet will need. An evil witch may need a broom and poisoned apple, a superhero might have a super ray gun and cap, and an alien might have several arms and legs. Use your imagination to create truly original Halloween puppets.

After the glue has dried, host a Halloween puppet show. For added fun, you can also make a haunted house with scrap paper, paint, and large piece of poster board.