Halloween provides a spooktacular opportunity for your little ghouls and goblins to gather with friends and share a fright night. Regardless of your kids’ ages, you can plan a ghostly party that will meet their needs and allow them to enjoy the holiday. To get your munchkins in the holiday spirit, plan some games. These activities will fit well into your ghoulish gathering and make you a major hit among the neighborhood tots.
Stifle the Scary
While Halloween is intended to be a spooky holiday, you don’t want your games to be so spooky that some of your participants have nightmares. When planning your Halloween gathering, think carefully about the ages of your guests and ensure that all of your activities are scary enough to give them a momentary fright, but not so scary that they have to sleep with the lights on until Christmas.
Get Them Crafting
Make your Halloween competitions crafty. Purchase small pumpkins and allow your guests to try their hands at carving these tiny gourds into jack o’lanterns. If your guests are too young to wield a knife, give them a marker and let them draw their designs onto the surface. Or show your guests that they don’t need fancy parts to craft the perfect Halloween costume. Instead, ask them to design a costume using only construction paper. Allow the party guests to vote on the best creation, and reward the maker with a Halloween-themed prize.
Run Off the Sugar Rush
After your kiddos fill their bellies with Halloween candy, they will likely need a physical activity to help them bring their energy back to a manageable level. Engage them in a physical Halloween game so that they don’t return to their parents hyper and bouncing off the walls. Play a game of skeleton tag by giving one party guest a skeleton mask and challenging the other guests to stay away from this ghastly individual. As they run about, they will burn right through that sugar rush.
Trick or Treat Them Into Learning
Integrate some learning into your Halloween festivities with mentally challenging games. Create a scavenger hunt by attaching pieces of candy to note cards and writing clues on each as to the location of the next tasty treat. Make a math challenge by writing simple math problems on slips of paper, folding them and placing them into balloons. Label plastic jack o’lanterns with the solutions to these problems and fill them with candy. Give each kiddo a balloon to pop and after he solves his problem, let him pick up the jack o’lantern that matches the solution.
Spookify the Evening
No Halloween spectacular is complete without a round of frightful tales. Turn your story time into a game by asking guests to pick the tale that they think will most frighten their peers. Gather a collection of scary story books and let each guest pick a tale to read from the compilation. After each guest reads his tale, ask the listeners to rank the story from 1 to 10, based upon how creepy it was. Give a prize to the guests who picked out the freakiest story of the evening.
Photo Credit
- halloween image by Nicolas D from Fotolia.com
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