Ellie and I have had the best time this October doing Halloween crafts! My two boys never enjoyed crafting, so I am soaking up the fact that she is really interested in art. While she certainly needed a little help, these five easy Halloween crafts for toddlers were simple enough to give her a fair amount of independence. Bonus: All of these activities are great for fine motor development!
1. Cotton Ball Ghost
Our first activity was a cotton ball ghost from mombrite.com. I cut the ghost for her out of black paper so that she could see where she hadn’t put cotton balls easier. I also decided that dipping cotton balls in a plate of glue would be easier for Ellie at this point in her development than squeezing a bottle of glue. She covered most of the ghost herself, and I helped her with the last cotton balls to make sure that no black was still showing. Lastly, she glued eyes and a mouth that I cut for her onto her ghost.
2. Paper Plate Monster
This paper plate monster from gluedtomycraftsblog.com was really easy for Ellie to do. I cut all of the tissue paper, an eye from the website, some ears, and a mouth, and Ellie assembled her monster. I found that the easiest way to glue this was to just use a glue stick on a large portion of the plate and let her stick the tissue paper.
3. Salt Spider Web
The salt spider web from teachbesideme.com was probably the most difficult craft that we did, but it would be really great for an older toddler. This one took preparation on my part the day before we attempted it so that the glue could dry the salt to the paper. Ellie wanted to paint the entire paper instead of just putting the watercolor on the salt and watching it spread, so there were some areas that she painted and some that she didn’t. I had in my head that the watercolors would spread on the salt farther than they did, so it turns out that it wasn’t really developmentally appropriate for her. We will try this one again once she is ready to more purposefully place a paintbrush on paper. As a side note, I really loved that the teacher on this website used Eric Carle’s The Very Busy Spider with this craft!
4. Ghost Painting
Our ghost painting from kidscraftbarn.com was a huge success! We substituted watercolors for regular paint and used a smaller brush, but Ellie was able to paint all around the ghost cutout and leave the imprint on the page. The cutout was cute, too, so we wound up with both as a craft!
5. Paint Pumpkin
ABCDee Learning is one of my favorite places to find toddler crafts, and this drip paint pumpkin was on her Instagram page. Ellie did need help squeezing the paint on this one, but it was the easiest pumpkin we’ve ever done! I will say that some of the paint chipped off pretty easily, but apparently I was supposed to coat the pumpkin with sealer first.
Let us know your favorite easy Halloween crafts for toddlers in the comments!
