Start Off Your Halloween Celebrations With Some Family Oriented Activities

Posted on September 28th, 2010 by Jennifer Marcial-Ocasio

It is amazing how fast the year has gone by. With October being around the corner, it is a good idea to start brainstorming to see which family activities would make all family member feel more at home after your recent relocation.

Not only will this help you cope with your move, but making activities in your home could open many possibilities into getting to know your new neighbors and your kids making new friends. Make sure you are ready to go and kick-off the Halloween season before the fall wind blows trick-or-treaters straight to your home. Not all Halloween decorations and activities need to be expensive and time consuming. Making it a DIY (Do It Yourself) activity, everyone will have fun, get together and start enjoying the festivities soon. With the following projects that are easy, fun and very affordable all you need is the right amount of imagination to have a blast during this upcoming season.

It is never too early to prepare a fabulous trick or treat basket for your kids. Keeping your children occupied and entertained after you relocate to a new place is one of the best ways to help them acclimate with the new surroundings. Forget about sending your kids to look for candy with an old and boring plastic pumpkin; instead, opt to bedazzle it and make it a unique one. Recycle that old plastic pumpkin from the year before or the year before that one, yeah we know, we tend to keep many stuff around, and transform it. You could paint it with spray paint and give it a unique color or even make it glow in the dark. You can also grab some old rags around the house, or buy a few yards of fabric that matches your little goblins outfit and, using a glue gun, help your child cover the pumpkin. You can add any type of decorations to it. From spiders to crowns, pictures and even their name, you will be able to create a matchless basket for your children.  If you opted to paint them, wait until they are dry and then, let your children paint them and decorate them using markers, stickers, jewelry, and anything that will stick or be painted on them.

Once the costumes are ready, it is time to do some cool and fun decorations for the home. There is no Halloween without bats around. Create some batty friends that you could easily hang from your ceiling. All you need is pompom balls (any color you want), a bag of those white and black rolling eyes (or you can just make them from construction paper) and some black foamy paper or black construction paper. The pompom balls will serve as the body; you stick the eyes and the cut a set of wings that will have to be glued to the bats sides. With a piece of thread you can hang them from wherever you want. Another option is to get several pumpkins; clean them and set them aside. You can leave a few for some traditional pumpkin carving and then take a few that will be mad into scary bats. How? Easy, with black paint, you can easily turn the orange pumpkin into a black ball. Draw some eyes or stick some of the ones you bought for the bats mentioned above and finish off by creating their wings. Use a piece of card box because they will be sturdier. Draw a wing, cut it and paint it black. Glue it to a stick and insert it into the sides of the pumpkin. Your big, black, bat is ready to scare some visitors around.

Oh, and by the way, you can also buy chalkboard paint and create a writeable pumpkin or bat. It will be a fun thing for kids to write on and easily erase it. It will be your instant messaging board around the home. Leave a cute message to your kids at night and they can respond when they wake up. And we can’t forget our Casper friend either. Don’t through away your one gallon milk jugs, clean them and keep them for this fun recreation. All you need is the milk jug, a permanent black marker, and some flameless candles. All you need to do is draw the round eyes, their eyebrows and their mouth shaped as an O. Finish by inserting the flameless candle and you will have your own Casper and friends around your house. They can also work as small lamps for your kids rooms throughout the Halloween season.

These are fun things that the entire family should partake in regardless of their age. As soon as you relocate into your home, you can also invite some neighbors and make them part of these fun creations. What better way of getting to know your new neighbors and making some friends along the way? Keeping family quality time alive is very important for every kid and their development. With these simple and fun activities you will be sharing not only time, but memories that will last forever.

Related Articles:

1. Activities for You & Your Family During Christmas Eve
2. Make Sure Your Kids Stay Safe on Halloween with Some Basic Safety Tips
3. How to Throw a Halloween Bash on a Not-So-Scary, Just-Moved Budget

Tags: activities, affordable, halloween

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 10:33 am and is filed under Moving Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.