Handmade Classroom Halloween Decorations

What a fun week we had! It was the usual crazy busy week with preschool, art class, dance class, gym class, Sunday Arabic class and to top it all, it was Halloween! Alya loves Halloween and she made me become fond of it too. I am blessed because she does not care about eating the Halloween candy at all...at least for now. Instead she is content counting, sorting and matching the pieces, and playing candy store with us. Sometimes, she asks for permission to eat a piece of candy after lunch and she usually eats only half.

Notice the look on her face

She enjoyed carving the pumpkin and attended during the weekend a Halloween party at our Little Gym. She insisted on wearing the cowgirl hat from her birthday party. She had a blast and visited the haunted house 6 times!

Did I mention that I am the room parent at my daughter's preschool? (and also at her sunday Arabic Language school) yeah...a lot of work goes into these! If one more person asks me what I do all day long since I don't work, I think I will stop being polite!

So Alya's preschool organized a Spook-tacular classroom contest, every room was decorated by teachers and parents and on the Harvest Halloween Parade, parents voted for the best decorated room.    three emails later, I and another parent  showed up in addition to the teacher and assistant teacher. The other parent could not stay for long. I ended up staying for four hours. I packed a lunch for Alya and a cup of tea for me. Alya was a super duper helper! I was pleasantly surprised to see her come up with ideas, and execute them. I also agreed with the teacher to incorporate every craft the kids make in the decoration, which was absolutely wonderful!

The teacher decorated the majority of the room, I did the following:

A Spook-tacular board: I asked the teacher to take scary pictures of the kids. I drew the shape of a scary spooky haunted house on brown paper. I wanted it to be black but they did not have any left by the time I came. I glued the pictures in the shape of window panes. I added some glittery grass, a flying witch, some tombs with glittery RIPs, glittery pumpkins and scary cats. Alya made a purple moon and I made few black bats with the construction paper. Alya added her own rainbow scary cat few glittery pumpkins of her own. She adores everything rainbow-y and glittery.

Look at this scary face!

 Alya made a purple moon and I made few black bats with the construction paper. Alya added her own rainbow scary cat and few glittery pumpkins of her own. She adores everything rainbow-y and glittery.

Alya colored and cut this purple moon

She also made the cat and pumpkins

To make the glittery witch just cut out these shapes and add some Elmers's glue and glitters. shake off the excess and put back in the glittery container for future use. I wrote on the house the words spooky and boo and used an excess of the glue on purpose and let it drip to give it a scary bloody feel. I added the red glitter.

I made these from scraps of paper

Glittery pumpkins

Spooky! 

the witch with glittery outfit and boots

scary cat with purple eyes

Witches Boots

Just add glitter on elmer's glue

I also made this ghost out of simple A4 white photocopier paper. Just cut them in 4 long equal strips and make paper links chain out of them. Hang the main paper link chain from the ceiling and add layers and layers and play with the length until you get the shape of a ghost. I added black eyes and mouth of out a black streamer. You can use paper. I used what I had. 

Halloween paper link chain ghost

That is how you do it!

I also made these cute hanging swirling ghosts. I used white cardboard paper that I found on the heavy side. I think thinner paper would be better. Just trace the shape of a spiral and cut it out. Add eyes and mouth and hang it.

Hanging Swirling Ghosts

On the day of the parade, Alya was dressed up as Jessy from the movie Toy Story. It is her all time favorite movie. She is still going throughout the cowgirl and everything horses phase. Remember her last birthday? Read about it here. Yeah, we are still going throughout that phase. She played the role and asked me to called her Jessy or Cowgirl Alya all day long. Did I mention that we won the contest? yes we did! the Kids won a brand new wooden puppet set for their classroom! When I picked up Alya from preschool today, I saw her and her friends playing with it and she was screaming..you will not eat me..I will run away from you! made my day and every minute of those four hours spent decorating paid off! This is why motherhood is all about..those 2 seconds made it all worthwhile!

Howdy Partner!

Psssssst..by the way, do you ever take candy from your children's candy bucket behind their back and eat them? just asking ;)

Happy Halloween!

Nadine