Children's Halloween Books and Crafts

Toilet Paper Pumpkins

Today I thought I would share with you some of the Halloween books we have been reading and some of the Halloween crafts we have been doing (some tied into the books and some not). This morning, we started our crafts with our toilet paper pumpkins. A tutorial can be found on The Sweet Life. These were easy enough for Hazel to be able to do and they look so cute. We have them on a windowsill in our family room.

Vampire and Ghost

Mummy, Bat and Witch

I know I mentioned in a previous post Erica Silverman's book, The Big Pumpkin. This is a story about a witch who grows a pumpkin to make pumpkin pie, but the pumpkin grows so large she cannot get it off the vine. Along come a ghost, vampire, and mummy who each try, but cannot do it and then along comes a bat (much smaller than the others) who has the idea of working together. Then they have pumpkin pie at a Halloween party. It is very cute and in no way scary. Hazel really doesn't know what a witch, vampire, ghost, or mummy are, so she has been asking us all sorts of questions about them. While we had the book out of the library we read it at least twice a day. I had needle felted her some of the characters, but we also made the characters out of toilet paper rolls. We started with the bat after I saw the idea on Living, Loving, Learning Naturally. (Another great bat idea can be found on Reading Confetti--Handprint  bats without the toilet paper roll.) To make the witch we painted the toilet paper roll green (well actually we had done this to make Christmas napkin rings last year, but we had one left over). Then we put black paper around the bottom and cut out a witch hat from the black paper. We added eyes and for her nose we cut a Christmas tree confetti in half and glued it on. Then we added a mouth. For the vampire, we covered the tube in white and then dressed in black and added hair and face. For the mummy we covered it in white and then added eyes and then covered it again in white strips. For the ghost, we covered it in white and then used a white paper towel over it and of course added eyes. Hazel loves having the characters from the book even though we no longer have the book at home.

Another story we like is Five Little Pumpkins by Iris Van Rynbach. While reading blogs the other day I saw this neat craft to make a puppet for the story on Family Ever After. She had a guest blogger from Delia Creates. You can also get a copy of the story from DLTK's website. She also has felt board patterns there. And today, another of my favorite bloggers posted another craft for this story. Check out Rachel's craft at I Heart Crafty Things.

A few more of our favorite Halloween books are The Night Before Halloween by Natasha Wing. It goes along like The Night Before Christmas, but has to do with Halloween and the monsters, ghouls, witches, etc. preparing a party for the trick-or-treaters. Again, not scary for a toddler.

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams is a great book to read aloud. It has different things (mostly clothing) trying to scare the little old lady when she is walking home through the forest in the dark. All of the actions can be acted out so we have fun with it. It has a very happy ending, so I enjoy reading it to Hazel.

Trick-or-Treat, Smell My Feet! by Lisa Desimini is a great story about witch twins who terrorize the kids of their town. However their Halloween spell backfires. It is suppose to make the children unable to say "Trick-or-Treat" and instead say "Smell my feet!" However they make a mistake when they are laughing at the kids and become babies again. Hazel loves it and I certainly don't mind reading it over and over.

The newest book we have taken out is The Hallo-wiener by Dav Pilkey. This story is one of those that the dog who is always picked on for how he looks becomes the hero of Halloween night. And then is big enough to help his "friends" even further. Needless to say a very happy ending and a great book about friendship and dealing with bullying.

We have also been enjoying It's Pumpkin Time! by Zoe Hall. This book goes from kids planting pumpkin seeds to carving the pumpkins on Halloween and putting out the Jack-o'-lanterns before going trick-or-treating. It is a great look at pumpkins in a simplistic view. I like it because I plan to cut open a pumpkin and bake it in the next week or so with Hazel and talk more about pumpkins.

Spider toppers

Our Bat Toppers

Bat Topper

There are a few other books we have been enjoying, but these are our favorite Halloween stories. A few more Halloween crafts we did today: pompom pencil toppers as found on Boredom Busting Mommy.

We also made some pompom pumpkins.

Today we also visited a friend's store, Village Art, which is unfortunately closing at the end of November. The owner is a friend from elementary school (and we both had last names that started with E so we were always in home room together in high school). While I shopped her closing sale, Hazel did some art projects. (See above)

And finally we will share a preview of the Halloween cards we are sending to our family. Since I took this picture we added eyes and a mouth to each footprint ghost. I saw this idea somewhere, but can't remember where exactly (or should I say where I saw it the first time as I have seen it in several other places). We did the footprints yesterday pre-bath. I figured since she already needed one, we might as well have fun.