Halloween Party Games for Kids

Halloween parties for young kids are easy if you do them in centers or rotations. Here are the ones I’ve done for the last 10 years or so in my classroom. 
THESE ARE ALL CENTER GAMES OR ROTATIONS. I USUALLY DO 5. 
1. Bingo using candy corn counters
2. A craft of some sort (Tootsie Roll Pop ghosts is a good one or making a pony bead orange, black and white bracelet on pipe cleaners is good too). 
3. Decorate a pumpkin cookie using orange icing and lots of sprinkles, chocolate chips and candy corn for eyes and smiles. 
4. Tic Tac Toe
5. Pin the Spider on the Web OR Ring Toss Spider just use black construction paper spiders and draw a giant web on orange poster board or butcher paper). Or buy a ring toss game or Pin the Nose on the Pumpkin game Here. 

6. Bean Bag Toss into a large wood pumpkin. 
7. Some years I have done Hot Potato Pumpkin with a soft stuffed pumpkin and Halloween Monster Mash music. When out go pick a treat. 
These all work well with K-3 kids and older. 

CENTER 1 – BOO BINGO with Candy Corn as Markers. You’ll need prizes for each center. 

Every year I do a bingo game as the first center. In these little black cups are candy corn erasers we used for counters to mark our bingo places. Some years I use real candy corns but with all the kids handling them I don’t want them eating them so erasers in candy corn shapes work better. I think I had lack cats and pumpkins too. 

 CENTER 2 – CRAFTS  (Tootsie Roll Pop Ghosts is a good one) 

This was a cute “Decorate the Monster Face” center I got from the Dollar Store. I think it had 6 different monsters and lots of eyeballs, smiles and noses and stuff. Each child got to pick one and decorate the face. They loved them. 

 CENTER 3 – PUMPKIN COOKIE DECORATING. I add sprinkles, choc chips etc. 

Each year I do cookie decorating. I have quite a selection of sprinkles and candies to do it with too.

 The kids love to add M and Ms and candy corn and chocolate chips for faces.

This year they put their cookies on this cute napkin. Inside were 4 pieces of paper to write a scary story when they got done. We also made “ghost suckers” out of these tootsie roll pops. You just pass out white tissues, and a piece of orange yarn. They tie the tissue around the yarn and add a ghost face with the oval open mouth and dot eyes. Easy peasy. 


GOODIE BAG ART TO START THE PARTY

We started the day decorating our bags. I have 5 different designs I have hand drawn. There is a skeleton, a witch, a frankinstein, a vampire, and a candy corn. They color, cut out and glue them on a brown paper bag. This is their goodie bag they’ll take around to each center. 
I looked at a few coloring page and then freehand drew these cute little Halloween guys. 

Here are the Frankie, candy corn and skeletons

Here is the witch and more frankies.

CENTER 4 – TIC TAC TOE

I made a tic tac toe center game out of cardstock. I found these matching skeleton tablecloth and erasers at Target for really cheap like $3.00 for the erasers and $5.00 for the wipe off tablecloth. The kids loved playing tic tac toe. I made 3 game boards for 6 kids to partner up. There were plenty of colors of erasers. We had orange, blue, purple pink and green. 

Here is a close up of one of the games being played. 

Here is another team playing on the pink board using green and orange erasers.

    CENTER 5 PIN THE SPIDER ON THE WEB and PUMPKIN BEAN BAG TOSS. 
The last center was a pin the spider on the web center as well as Pumpkin Bean Bag Toss. I have found over the years that it doesn’t take long for you to finish a group of 5 kids on the pin the spider game and they get bored of the bean bag after about 8 minutes of it. So I combined them. The kids get to do each one and the beanbag is fun to watch as well as the pin the spider.

Here is the bean bag toss game. The bean bags are black felt bats and orange felt pumpkins filled
with beans. A mom helper made them for me many years ago. My hubs made the wooden pumpkin. .

I had a few moms who brought darling treats for our Halloween Party. Thanks to Hunter’s mom
for the CUTE PUMPKIN COOKIES! The kids ate them after lunch and were in heaven.

Monster face glazed donuts were a real hit with the first graders in my class. 
And to top it off it was a birthday over the weekend so one mom brought in donuts! We were really sugared up when we went home. Happy Halloween Everybody! I hope you get lots of good treats!

Spider Math and Art Activities

Spider Math and Art Activities are fun for the primary grades K-3. 

Spiders are a very fun and interesting theme in first grade. There are many math activities you can do too with the 8 legs too. I like to focus on memorizing the doubles math facts.

We made cute Spiders on a Stick and used sticker dots and funny eyes to decorate them. The crazy eyes I found        The writing paper I found at Activity Village. I just wrote in the Actostic S-P-I-D-E-R myself with a black sharpie marker and then copied them for the class. 

A REALLY cute eyeball sight word bingo game I found to do on spider day is at at Make Take Teach’s blog.  You will need some eyeballs from Walmart. Now  is the time to get them!

I got the cute Spider Paper from  activity village. An ABC order using spider words that I’m making up for a center game is HERE at TPT. It is free.   A pack of spider facts and writing paper I found for free is HERE at TPT.  A printable mini book with cute pictures I found for free is HERE on TPT.
Compound Word Spider Activity we do at centers. I’m almost done cutting it out!  A doubles math game I found as a free printable is HERE from TPT.

Cute spider web cupcakes I made on the left. I just added a little spider ring to each that I got in a package of 24 at Walmart for a few bucks. They all turned out so cute! 
I think I got these spider rings from Walmart. The kids love wearing them when they were done with their work. 
This spider on a stick is really easy. Here is a simple tutorial….

 Here is how you make it. Cut 8 inch by 1/2 inch legs and 5 inch circles for spider. You will need 8 legs. I have the kids bend them back and forth accordian style. Then cut out 3 black circles 5 inches in diameter for each child. Make one slightly smaller like 4 1/2 inches. That will be the head. One for the head and two for the body front and back. Then glue on all 8 legs and stick down on one of the body circles. Then cover legs and stick with the last black circle on the body section. Thenglue on the head circle slightly higher over the body. Then add colorful sticker dots and crazy eyes. 

We did acrostic spider poems a few years ago. They turned out great. This was a gifted group of first graders. 

Here are our finished spiders on a stick art project. The kids loved waving them around at each other. 

Kids Write About Pets

We have to do opinion writing and narrative writing this year and it has to be rubric scored. So I have to teach topic sentences and supporting sentences.

Krew wrote about his Two Favorite Pets. 

I found the cute writing paper FREE from TPT. HERE is the Link. It was from Casey Hallett. Thanks Casey!

Here was our finished bulletin board of Kids Writing About Pets. We had 2 fish. The rest were dogs and cats. No birds. 

Favorite Pets is always a good first writing project for first graders. They all have an opinion about the best pets in the world. 

 I like to give the kids a fun prompt to get them thinking. So we picked the topic of Pets. Everybody but one child had a pet at home so that made it easy. The one who didn’t have a dog or cat, made up what his favorite pet would be.

They are pretty good at following directions. Koby’s fish likes to do back flips!!! 


I also had the kids do an art project with just a bunch of cut out pieces for bodies, heads, tails and ears and they chose their favorites.

 I used gray, yellow, orange, brown and black paper so there are many fun combinations.
1. The body was an upside down U shape.
2.  The heads were heart shapes. (2 different sizes)
3. The faces were all circles (2 different sizes).
4. The ears were ovals and triangles.
5. The tails were smile shapes.
6. I gave them each 2 white stickers for the eyes. The kids did the rest.

Cute Dog and Cat Art. 

I called them up in groups of 4 and they picked their shapes for their pets. I told them they didn’t have to really match the real pet. They were just doing dog and cat art.

We are still working on capitalization in our First Grade Writing. . It will take a few more weeks to get it down. 😀 

A few things I found online to add to centers the week we wrote about pets were some cute vocabulary pictures and words from TPT HERE. Some fall writing papers are HERE.

Great Writing Mia! 

Here are our finished edited writings. We went through the whole writing process with a topic web, sloppy copy, teacher edit and final copy. I think they turned out great.