We love Halloween! I throw an annual Halloween party for my daughter and her friends. As my daughter gets older the Halloween party evolves into looking a bit different each year. My favourite years to plan were grades one through three. On average we have approximately ten children attend.
Invitations
Pinterest has a ton of free printables. I like homemade cards, so we usually go to our local scrapbook shop to pick up 2-3 sheets of orange or Halloween themed cardstock and the dollar store to pick up Halloween stickers. My daughter decorates them and I fill out the information to ensure its accuracy. This year we went to the dollar store and put the homemade card into a gift bag with a few candies.
Food
Thanks to Pinterest, there is no shortage of creative foods to make. Children tend to eat very little at parties because they often want to just continue playing. I try to avoid sit down meals and create a buffet style where guests can help themselves as they want. I find this helps to waste less food. When it comes to drinks I try to serve juice boxes so that the liquid is somewhat contained and helps avoid spills. I also try to keep all drinks on a main table so that I don’t find mystery spills a few hours later when trying to clean up.
Goody Bags
I feel like they are completely optional. I usually give them out and find that they work great if the party starts to reach a lull at the end while waiting for parents to pick up the kids. I let the kids open while still at my house. I like to give the bags a theme and everyone gets the same items whether it’s for a boy or a girl. For our Halloween parties I tend to make the items tied to trick-or-treating and relatively inexpensive: candy, glow-in-the-dark nail polish, light up necklaces, glow bracelets, reflective bracelets, balloons, fun shaped pens, erasers, stickers and mini notepads.
Games
Wrap The Mummy: This is by far the most successful party game I have ever had. I purchase the cheapest toilet paper I can find and break the party guests into teams. One person plays the mummy and the other wraps the person in toilet paper. After everyone is wrapped the mummies gets to break free from the toilet paper which leads to a big mess. The second part of this game is to see who can pick up their toilet paper the fastest. We are lucky where we live the paper is compostable.
Pin The Boo on the Ghost: You do not have to be a crafty person to make this game. I buy two large poster boards from our local dollar store and make my own ghost. I make “boos” out of construction paper and have the guests write their names on them. It is essentially ‘Pin The Tail on the Donkey.”
Handless Donut Eating Contest: We had beautiful wooden beams in our kitchen which made it easy to use thumbtacks and fishing line to hand donuts from. Relatively simple game where the kids had to eat the donut without using their hands. First person to bite and release their donut from the fishing line wins.
Pass The Broom or Pitchfork: This game is basically hot potato. You play music while the guests stand in a circle and pass the item quickly to each other, once the music stops the person left holding the item is out. The game continues until there is only one person left. We used a dollar store witches broom one year and with the kids so excited to not be the last one holding, the broom lost all of its straw and lasted one round.
Memory: I use a Halloween platter and small Halloween knickknacks: eyeballs, plastic bugs and spiders, mini pumpkins, mini skeleton hands, candles, etc. and cover the items with a Halloween tea towel. The guests are put into teams where they have to see how many of the items they can remember in 30 seconds.