Spooky Halloween crafts!

It's been a fab couple of weeks at ARTventurers with some great spooky art and craft sessions with different age groups - Halloween is a great time to really go to town with colour and paint! Thought I'd share with you a few of the things we've been doing this fortnight.....

Pop up ghosts/monsters

These were really popular with all age groups - its a great craft which can easily be adapted for different ages and abilities. You'll need - a polystyrene or paper cup, a craft stick (or lolly stick), some tissue paper, card, sellotape, pens

 One of the pop up ghosts from a toddler session

The first step was to decorate the cup - in the toddler sessions we did this with tissue paper (orange of course!), halloween stickers and pens. I try to get the little ones tearing up the tissue paper rather than cutting it for them - great for coordination and strengthening muscles!

For the littlest ones I had then pre cut some ghost shapes which they sellotaped onto the sticks. With the older groups they let their imaginations run riot and created their own scary monsters (just make sure they're not too big to fit inside the cup!)

The last step was then to push the stick with ghost/monster attached through the bottom of the cup so that the ghost could then fit inside the cup and then "pop" out. We used thin craft sticks which could easily be pushed through the base of the cup but if you're using lolly sticks then just snip a slot in the bottom of the cup with scissors.



Scary spiders

A really easy but effective toddler craft is these hanging spiders - really popular with little ones, can be used as spooky decorations, and we danced around with ours at the end of the sessions!

All you'll need is a circle of black card, some white card or paper, some coloured strips of card and some wool. I don't think I need to put any instructions with this one as hopefully it's self explanatory - for the littlest ones I pre cut all of the shapes, the older ones could cut out their own legs and features.

Spooky spider at the top of this pic!

We tried to concertina fold our spider legs - not necessary but just another skill I was trying to introduce into the activity. We also used paint dabbers to add detail to the eyes but again not absolutely necessary - I just know they're always popular at my classes :)

Eyeball painting!

I think I've blogged before about bouncy ball painting - one of my all time favourite painting activities and this is just a spooky variation on it! I bought some eyeball bouncy balls in the pound shop and set them in the middle of the painting table with some large trays, black paper and plates of paint (we used Halloween-y colours). The children put the paper on the tray and then dipped the eyeballs into paint and placed them on the paper. Moving the tray around and therefore the balls around the paper makes some really great patterns, plus its great exercise in hand/eye coordination plus lots of fun too! I think the paintings produced looked quite spiders web like - once dry you could get your little one to make a spider to stick onto it!

 A spooky eyeball painting!

Pumpkin lantern craft activity

Another paper based craft which works well with different age groups - just black and orange paper required!

We decorated a piece of orange paper with a pumpkin face made of black paper shapes - for the youngest I provided some pre cut shapes but for the older kids it was a great chance to get scissor happy and produce their own scary faces. We then sellotaped the two edges together to make the lantern and simply added a black paper handle. Simple but cute - I've got a family of these dotted round my kitchen  and they look great!

You can see a pic of one of the lanterns made in the spooky spider picture above!

So what else did we do??

We made haunted house cards with paper shapes, cotton wool and Halloween stickers..



We painted Halloween pictures with stamps and stencils......

We made spooky spider biscuits with Oreo cookies, strawberry laces and coloured icing - yum!



With the older children we created our own Halloween masks!

Phew - what a fantastic, busy Halloween it's been! Well done and thanks to everyone who's been ARTventuring with us this past fortnight :)

So now its onwards and upwards into a new half term and the countdown towards Christmas begins....we're already taking bookings for our super sparkly Christmas art and craft sessions so get in touch if you want to reserve a space! And this week sees the launch of our new Thursday morning class at Washington Arts Centre! This week is "Fireworks" so join us as we create glitter firework pictures, bonfire collages, make rockets, try string painting and lots more!