Halloween Party

We had our Halloween party early this year. My big idea was to host a costume swap, which we'll touch on in a separate post, and I wanted the party to coincide with the start of that. Also, I wanted it early enough that I could justifiably not give out copious amounts of candy.

We had four activity stations at the party. They were all pretty much self-run, or easily run by the parents who came with their kids.

The exception to that was the face painting station. I painted faces for 3 hours straight and only quit when everyone and their mother had a colorful design on their cheeks. I brought out every face painting book we had and let the kids look through them or took requests- turns out I can draw a pretty good Angry Bird. Who knew? 

For face paint I followed a DIY recipe- basically corn starch, food coloring, face cream and water. It worked well enough for the simple designs but I had trouble doing the intricate ones that most kids wanted. I think the next thing I ask our Friends group for will be a nice set of face paints. It was certainly a popular enough station to warrant doing it more.

We were supposed to have a Bean Bag Toss. I made a Jack-O-Lantern, taped it to the side of our big box from the castle building day with the appropriate cut-outs and then realized I didn't have ANYTHING I could use as bean bags. But never fear, we had legos!

This game proved particularly popular with the toddlers who would just run up to the mouth and shove a lego in, giggling madly the entire time.

Using a bunch of the smaller boxes left over from our castle building days, we set up a painting station. The IDEA was to paint the faces of haunted house creatures and then we'd stack them together into the basic shape of a house and decorate the top of a book shelf with it. In actuality, I accidentally left the paint bottles on the table after measuring out nice little bits, and it turned into a who can get the most paint on a box competition. I love messy, process oriented art and so do the kids.

And finally we had a Pin the Face on the Jack-O-Lantern.

I honestly expected the party to be me and a few of the after school crowd that I could tempt away from the computers. But, hoo boy, did people turn out for this one. We had over 40 kids, plus their parents, cycling through the stations. We ended the night with an over-sized and slightly scary pajama story time.

 

 The aftermath.