Spending on a trick-or-treat bag to collect your Halloween treats can often feel like a waste of money. If you have not already got reusable buckets or fabric trick-or-treat bags and are out of time to head to the shops, you can try this fun activity instead. You’ll be encouraging your children to be environmentally friendly by recycling, reducing , and reusing.
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Easy Trick-or-Treat Bag
Preparing the things you need for this activity together with your child will stimulate their curiosity and can initiate interesting and engaging conversations. This is a perfect activity to start a discussion about the colours, shapes and textures that are seen at this time of year in nature and in our home decorating. Chat about the images and words you’ll be using to decorate their loot bags and why they are associated with Halloween. As always, our activities are easily adapted to suit all ages making them fun for the entire family.
What You Need:
- Use old Gift Bags (any kind will do as you’ll be covering them) or fold your own gift bag
- sticky paper or paper shapes, stickers, printed Halloween images and words, glow in the dark stickers
- Glue (quick dry if you are doing this close to Halloween)
- glitter glue, sequins, or other sparkly items
What You Do:
- Provide old gift bags (1 for each child).I find a medium to large bag is best.
- Give children glue and items to stick onto the bag. Let them choose to stick on stickers of bugs or other Halloween inspired objects or to draw scary things and cut them out to stick on. What you decide will depend on the age of the child you are working with. Older children will be able to draw more and do most of their own cutting out.
- Keep sticking and decorating until they are happy with the look of their trick-or-treat bag.
- If your child is still young and a non-writer, print out some Halloween words (Boo, Scream, Growl, Howl, Creepy, Hiss, Moan, Slobber, Crunch, Ahhhh!, Grrrr! Happy Halloween, Scary etc.) and cut them out. Older children can write the words or stick them on their bag.
- Add some sparkle with glitter glue.
- Leave them to dry. I recommend doing this at least 24 hours before you need to use them to allow the glue to properly dry.
Your homemade , recycled Trick-or-treat bag is now ready to use.
Our Halloween fun
Halloween was as always a super fun way to spend the day with my kidlets. We spent the morning getting ready. We stuck window clings on the windows, hung paper plate ghosts outside, put out our jar lanterns we had made, hung a broomstick on the door knocker with the words “Happy Hallo-scream”, put spiders and cobwebs in the windows and placed all our Halloween witches and pictures around the house.
Every year we squash a witch under the house-the children really like this! Finally we set out our pumpkins and dressed up. This year we had a four year old Dracula, an eight year old Hermione Granger, a six year old Devil and my hubby as Freddie Kruger. I was dressed as a witch.
I invited some little friends to join us from 2pm and we did:
Decorating Pumpkin shaped cookies
Some word searches, join the dots, colour by number, and colouring sheets all Halloween themed. I had various sheets for the age range and abilities of the children.
Time for face painting and temporary tattoos. I had bugs, snakes and skeleton tattoos for them to choose from. These are always a hit with my boys.
A movie-this time we watched Hocus Pocus , which was fine for my 8 year old and her friends but my 6 and 4 year old were not so thrilled by it, maybe a little grown up for them. They had a snack of popcorn (Scrambled crispy brains), cucumber fingers (mouldy fingers) and carrot strips (vomit chunks!)
They then had a bit of free play in the garden with torches and we lit all the candles in our glass jar lanterns and carved pumpkins.
Feeling hungry it was time for food. I served up cheese and tomato Pizza (scabs and pus), chicken pops (eyeballs) and worms (spaghetti) and to drink was red squash (blood) out of goblets.
At 6pm we headed out into the dark to trick or treat. The weather was dry and mild so perfect for lots of walking. We visited all the houses with pumpkins outside and were treated with lots of sweets and chocolates. One house had a witch who made the children stick their hands through a cloth into a bowl of goo! YUCK. A few of the houses really made an effort to decorate and looked great! We really enjoyed the front garden graveyard and the huge silvery space ship that had crashed.
I am a preschool and primary school teacher and mum to 3 children. I have been involved in education since 1997 and have trained in a variety of educational specialist areas. It is with this expertise that I write articles to help parents and educators provide quality learning experiences for the children in their care.
