Suggestions for what to do for a halloween party for maybe 10 5 year olds? We live in a country with no trick or treating.
Any other easy ideas that would be fun for kids who have really no idea what halloween is?
If you have enough room make a “haunted house” by hanging a curtain maze in one or more rooms.
Have the kids walk through with an adult. At intervals, have scary stations.
One might be the eye ball dish. (peeled grapes in a big bowl.) Tell the kids to handle them carefully, they are due to be put back into the owners.
A “brain” station, would be boiled stringy pasta, as it comes out of the boiling water, clump it all together into a relative sphere, don’t rinse , allow to cool.
Of course, the kids can’t see it, just touch it.
Dried corn, makes pretty good teeth.
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I’m doing a halloween party for 72 Japanese 2-10 year olds, must be MAD…
It is the same thing, no trick or treating and only the vaguest idea of what Halloween is.
Scary stuff is pretty much out, I think.
Last year we did make Mummy a Mummy, where the kids got into teams and wrapped up one mummy each with toilet paper. This was an absolute scream, and their very best bit was ripping it all off again!
This year I am doing fishing for with magnetic fishing rods and paperclipped halloween themed cards. On the back of the cards are numbers, and they’ll be able to choose however many stickers the number on the card says.
Also, a craft session goes down well. You could get the kids to make or decorate a trick or treat bag or box. In Japan milk is sold in 1 litre card cartons, so I saved them for weeks and chopped them off to make a little box. I precut orange and black paper the right size for the kids to wrap and glue to the box, and then gave them halloween stickers and cutouts to glue on to make a decoration. This year I have a similar thing except they will decorate bags not boxes.
Apple bobbing goes down like a lead balloon here - no kid wants to get their face wet, and no mother wants their kids face to be in water that other kids faces have been in.
We sing some very simple halloween songs - you can sing one to the ten little indians song; 1 little, 2 little, 3 little ghosts (etc) 10 little ghosts say BOO! They soon pick it up, and you could draw some pictures to go with it.
You could also do tossing bean bags or balls into a variety of baskets with Halloween characters pegged to them. That could be for prizes, too.
Another one I have done in previous years is to draw a massive Halloween scene and give each kid a sticker with their name on it. You tell them there’s a treasure box hidden in the picture, and they all have to stick their sticker where they think the treasure might be. At the end of the party you lift up the picture to show the back, where you have put the postition of the treasure, and the nearest sticker gets a prize. This is not great for real littles, as they cry if they don’t win. Lots and lots of mini prizes for everyone is the way to go!
How about doing musical chairs with cushions or sheets of paper instead of chairs. We do it to the Monster Mash music! I don’t do it down to the very last kid in order to avoid tears.
One other thing is not to bother with American candy etc. They don’t like it! I gave up a few years ago buying stuff at great expense for it to be spat out. Now I keep the trappings foreign but the snacks and sweets are Japanese and familiar.
Good luck!
Seventy-two children?!? You are mad, though of course I mean that in the best possible way. Good ideas!
I would not do anything very scary for 5-year-olds. I like the trick-or-treat idea, you could decorate each door and have a costumed person answer it. Face-painting is always a hit.
OK, I have no new ideas. Except I’ve found that dancing with balloons is always good. Throw some balloons out, have the kids bounce them around to some music.
The Mummy and trick or treat bag sounds real good. I’ll have to rethink the scary part. My daughter would like it but she’s used to “fun scary” versus “scary scary”
My five year old (six next week) loves the scary stuff, but only in a “fun scary” way.
Great ideas, all of you!
Brave souls…
It’s for my English school! 35 of them are my students and the rest are siblings and friends, so this is important advertising for me. It needs to be a very good party so the little darlings all clamour to join my classes!
I will have help from my office lady on the day, plus my husband and about four or five mothers have offered to help supervise games, as we’re going to do it like a work station system in a big hall for the first hour, and there will be 8 different things for the kids to do and collect stickers for. Then we’ll have joint singing and games, then there’ll be trick or treat time, snack time, send them home time, and DIE OF EXHAUSTION time.
My elder son gets slightly shafted by Halloween because his birthday is in the the week before, but I simply cannot do two parties at such short intervals. Luckily he likes to invite a cohort of his cronies to the big party, and they all have a good time. He’ll be nine this year, wonder how many more years it will last??
Oooh, so’s mine! Zack’s is the 22nd.
Oh, I know about that. My birthday is on Halloween, so it was hard to have a party, because there was always so much going on. Also I never got a fancy dinner, it was always PB&J. But having a holiday birthday makes up for a lot, while your little guy just gets the shaft.
Well…good luck! I hope everyone joins your school.
Yes, I am glad that I was not born in a holiday period, though my birthday fell in the middle of the summer holidays so parties were hard to organise because everyone was away.
My son has his problems, and is a challenging child in many ways, but one of his outstanding, best qualities is his good nature. He has never complained about not having his own individual party, he just says how cool it is to have a HUGE party (even though there is nothing remotely personal about it.) And he can be told where the presents are being hidden, and warned not to look, and he won’t because it would spoil the surprise.
Actually, thinking about it, that last bit is just NOT normal!
I had a Halloween party at my house for my 7-year-old Sunday School class a few years ago. I’m trying to remember what we did; we mixed up some kind of snack mix, where each ingredient had something to do with Halloween. I think we used pretzels (magic wands), candy corn (witches’ teeth), the thin string twizzlers were guts, etc. They enjoyed it.
They also enjoyed making masks with paper plates, construction paper, markers, etc.
Have fun!!!
My son’s is the 25th, so very close!