With the abundance of costumes, creepy settings and candy, it is no surprise that Halloween is a popular holiday among children. If your kids are like most, they likely delight in taking in spooktacular fun at the end of each October. To enhance your children’s enjoyment of this holiday, without adding to their sugar buzz, you can organize an array of Halloween games. These games allow curious children to join together in an age-appropriate exploration of this scary-tastic holiday.
Cost of a Good Time
Although Halloween is an exciting holiday, it can also be a pricey one. From the cost of a Halloween costume, or the fixings to make one, pumpkins, decorations and candy, many families find themselves pinched for cash. A cash crunch is no reason to abandon the concept of Halloween games. Many of these festive activities can be completed with little or no monetary investment, allowing you to provide your children with an inexpensive, yet enjoyable, holiday pastime.
Haunted Hunts
Send your kids on a spooktacular hunt this Halloween. Prepare a Halloween photo scavenger hunt by creating a list of common Halloween objects for hunters to seek out. Arm each group with a digital camera and send them on their way, encouraging them to race around town hunting out the listed object. If you want to keep your kids in the house while they play, try a black-cat clues activity by cutting out outlines of black cats and writing clues that point to various locations around the house on each. Before guests arrive, hide these black-cat clues around the house to create a string of cats that can be uncovered through the solving of each carefully composed geographical clue. Place a prize with the final clue in your feline string, and allow Halloween revelers to work together to follow the chain of clues you created.
Leap Into Learning
Sneak some learning in before your kiddos fall into a sugar-induced coma. Create a pumpkin-matching game by drawing faces on pumpkin-shaped cutouts, creating sets of identical pumpkins and then mixing them together and allowing players to pair them up. Or practice math with a candy count by arming each team with an assortment of candies and calling out math problems. Ask teams to indicate their answers to posed problems by rapidly counting out the correct number of candies and running the collection up to you.
Gross ’em Out Games
Use Halloween as an opportunity to gross out your guests with decidedly yucky games. Create feeler boxes by cutting holes in the sides of standard boxes and placing plates filled with everyday objects that feel supercreepy, such as peeled grapes that feel like eyeballs or cold spaghetti that is quite reminiscent of a plate of worms. Ask party-goers to reach into each box, feel the contents and then write down what they think is really in the box. Reward the player who guesses the most objects correctly.
Dress Up for Fun
Halloween is all about dressing up, so make dressing up key to your game. Divide players into groups, giving each several rolls of toilet paper. Challenge players to use the provided paper to craft toilet paper mummies, rewarding the group whose mummy is the spookiest. Or allow for even more creativity by giving each team nothing but coloring supplies and paper grocery bags and challenging them to craft a creative Halloween get-up.
Photo Credit
- halloween image by Nicolas D from Fotolia.com
