Button Pumpkin Patch

Since I had so many buttons left over from our fall tree craft, I decided to use some orange ones in a pumpkin patch craft.

First you use glue to make some squiggly lines on green paper.

Then you put green yarn on the glue.

My daughter is only 2 so she didn't really line up the yarn on the glue, but I just waited for her to put the yarn where she wanted it and then squirted some glue under the yarn in a few places. Older children might be able to follow the glue line with their yarn.

Then glue on orange buttons of all different sizes. You can follow along the yarn or, like my daughter did, glue them anywhere!

After it dried, I realized it was missing something. Leaves! We added those by scrunching up green tissue paper squares and gluing them randomly on the paper.

And there you have it, a button pumpkin patch!

Full Moons, Spinning Ghosts and Creepy Spiders

I'm falling behind on my Halloween crafts, so I have to combine a few in one post. I'll try to keep it short! Back when we made scarecrow silhouettes, I had a hard time deciding if I wanted to make them with sunsets or full moons as the background. I finally realized that I should save the full moon for a Halloween craft. But this ended up being more of a fall craft. Anyway, I drew a big circle on white paper, making it the size of a coffee filter. Then I squirted white and yellow paint in the middle of it and the kids mixed it up and spread it around the circle.

 Then I placed a coffee filter right on top of it and the kids pressed down a bit.

(Sorry about the ghostly hands!) After only a minute or two, I peeled it off. This gave the moons a little texture, which didn't really show up on camera, but it was there! When they were dry I cut them out and glued them to a piece of black paper. The kids painted trees and hills and anything else they wanted onto their paper.

I had also used a stencil and cut out some bats, cats and owls for them to glue on.

The black paint made the moon curl up a bit, as well as the black paper itself.

I just used some double stick tape under the moon edges and then flattened the whole thing between two heavy filing containers.
Earlier in the week we made spinning ghosts to hang in our room. I drew a very simple ghost pattern onto white paper and gave it a long "tail." I cut out the ghost part because I knew that would be difficult for my kids to do themselves.

So all they had to do was cut out the rest of the tail and draw in a face on both sides.

Last week we made spider rings.

I got the idea from Fantastic Fun and Learning so go there for directions. We made the small ones and only used one pom pom. I hot glued the pom pom on, but the kids used tacky glue to add the wiggle eyes. They LOVED them!

We also went on a field trip last week and picked out a pumpkin for our classroom. The kids painted it black, green and purple and then we made it into a spider. We glued on 8 wiggle eyes and two fangs cut from a small paper plate. I used large pipe cleaners for the legs and stuck them right into the pumpkin.

I must have been on a spider kick because over the weekend my daughter and I made a garbage bag spider. She was a really good helper when it came to filling the bags with leaves! I used electrical tape to tape the two bags together, glue dots to attach the wiggle eyes (I decided to just do 4 since not all spiders have 8 eyes), made the fangs from a paper plate again, and used JUMBO pipe cleaners for the legs. I used electrical tape to attach the legs as well. It now sits in the bare spot where all my roses used to be, waiting to greet trick-or-treaters!

I don't know if he's weather-proof, but luckily it's been a dry week and the legs are holding up just fine. I did use a few tent stakes to keep some of the legs in place, but even those without a stake are still standing. Yay!

Puffy Paint Pumpkins

Here's a simple project that the kids loved. I mixed up some shaving cream, Elmer's glue and food coloring to make orange and green puffy paint. The kids painted a pumpkin shape that I had glued to black paper (just like our Pop Rocks Pumpkins, only different colors). I reminded the kids to paint it on really thick and not spread it out a lot. That would make it puffy when it dried.

I had cut out a bunch of triangles from black craft foam. The kids added a face to their pumpkin. Even though the paint was made with glue, we still used a little glue on the craft foam, just in case.

For the mouths, I cut out semicircles,

and cut out the number of teeth each child asked for.

The orange ended up drying much darker, which was a nice surprise.

I still have a few more Halloween crafts for you, so stay tuned!

Adorable Spiders

Yeah, that's right. Adorable spiders.

Told you! That's my little girl. I used her face on my example. I got this idea from Mrs. Butterfield's First Grade. The kids painted 2-inch styrofoam balls. I stuck toothpicks in them so they could have something to hold on to while they painted.

Then I stuck them in a big piece of cardboard to dry.

I took pictures of the kids sticking pipe cleaners in them, but they seem to have vanished. What I did was use a sharpie to make 8 dots, 4 on each side of the ball, and that's where the kids put the pipe cleaners. (Each leg was half of a pipe cleaner.) I had taken pictures of the kids making a "spider face," whatever that meant to them. Then I cut them out and used a glue dot to attach them to the styrofoam ball.

So cute! I considered having them add 6 wiggle eyes to their head, so the spider would have 8 eyes, but I liked them too much as is.

I hung them from the lights by sticking paper clips into them.

Ain't she sweet? Love that look she's giving me. And speaking of my daughter, here is a pumpkin baby she gave to her day care teacher:

I got the idea from a Family Fun magazine. I found a small pumpkin with a long curly stem. I used a sharpie to draw the eyes and tied a ribbon on the stem.

I cut the nipple off a pacifier and used hot glue to attach it to the pumpkin.

(Thanks to my honey for taking those fancy photos!)
I had to snap a quick photo of Elise with the pumpkin before we left this morning.

I might have to make another one to keep here at home!

Pop Rocks Pumpkins

Let me start off by saying this is a sticky, sticky, STICKY project!! Ever since we made art with Kool-Aid powder (sprinkling it onto paper and spraying it with water), I've wanted to try the same thing with Pop Rocks. Well, it didn't work. The color from the Pop Rocks did not bleed off onto the paper. So I tried something else. Glue. First I cut out pumpkin shapes from orange card stock and glued them to green construction paper. The kids painted glue onto the pumpkins.

Then they sprinkled Pop Rocks onto the pumpkins. (I bought a pack of 3 Pumpkin Patch Orange Pop Rocks at Target.)

Luckily, I tried this project out on my own first. I noticed the Pop Rocks got sticky and clumped together very quickly outside of the bag. If I had not made my own first, I would have dumped them all in a bowl for the kids to use. So instead I dumped a few in my hand and the kids took a pinch or two as needed.

As soon as the Pop Rocks hit the glue, they started making popping noises! That was the cool part.

The longer they sat, the more bubbly and fizzy they got.

And very, very sticky. They never actually dried. I thought they looked cool so I hung them on the wall.

Within minutes I saw they were starting to drip.

Boo. So I took them down, covered them with plastic wrap and sent them home. Between the wreaths, pumpkin stamping and the Pop Rocks, I think I'm done using candy for art. For a little while, anyway!

Glittery Pumpkins

I got the idea for this next craft from Mess For Less, but she found the idea here. I had leftover orange paper plates from our Halloween party, and my center always has plenty of glitter. So I set out the plates with glue bottles and told the kids they could make any kind of face they wanted. They just used the glue bottle like a marker.

I also set out bowls of green and silver glitter and put spoons in them to make it easier for the kids to sprinkle it on the glue.

I let them sit like this for an hour or so before shaking the glitter off. I didn't want the glue to run and ruin their adorable faces! Then I used a hole punch to make a hole in the top of the plate and used a green pipe cleaner to make a stem. I decided to form it into a loop so they could be hung up.

They turned out so cute!

Another thing we made yesterday was gourd ghosts. A two-year-old teacher brought in a whole box of finger gourds for all the kids in the center. So I cleaned them and had each kid pick one. Then I set out black paint and some brushes and the kids painted ghost faces on them.

It was so simple. If I had more time, I would have had the kids paint them white first, but it was Halloween and we just didn't have time for that. But I think these look just fine, don't you?