9 Spooky Kids Activities to Celebrate Halloween at Home

Candy, costumes, pumpkins, and spiders – oh my! As the leaves change and the air gets slightly cooler, we’re preparing for spooky season. Things might look a little different this Halloween – but don’t worry, we have rounded up a few fun kids’ activities to get you and your future engineer in the spirit from the comfort of your home!

1. Create Your Own Halloween Costume

While everyone is at home, why not spend time on those Halloween costumes and create them yourself? Maybe you can hold a family contest to see who can create the best costume. Make it educational and have everyone follow the Engineering Design Process! Call your friends and family on Zoom and let them be the judges. Or even better, hold the contest on Zoom and compete against others!

2. Tell Scary Stories

Not good at coming up with stories on your own? Find a good, kid-appropriate, spooky storybook on Amazon! “Feel your pulse race and your skin tingle as you turn the pages of this spine-chilling anthology of spooky stories from around the world.”

Prepare your flashlight or candles and set the scene to tell stories all night!

3. Carve or Decorate Pumpkins

Of course, it’s a classic. See who can develop the most creative pumpkin designs or use different carving techniques and tools. Don’t want to bring out the carving utensils and get pumpkin gunk everywhere? Try painting your pumpkins or decorating with other craft materials instead!

4. Set Up a Carnival In Your Backyard

You can find all kinds of carnival-style Halloween games online. Grab a roll of raffle tickets, and you can even establish a prize system. Encourage kids to add up their tickets and see which prizes they can “afford” from the prize booth!

5. Decorate a Chocolate Haunted House

Like Christmas with Gingerbread House Kits, Halloween brings Haunted House Chocolate Cookie Kits! Bring out the creativity with a spooky, sweet treat.

6. Have a Halloween Movie Marathon

Spend the evening binging the silliest or spookiest Halloween movies. Whether it’s Hocus Pocus, The Haunted Mansion, Halloweentown, or Monster House – there are tons of Halloween movies on Amazon or Netflix to keep you busy.

7. Make Halloween Educational

Look around you! Are there things that happen this time of year that you can use as a teaching moment? Maybe the spiders have started to leave webs around – take this opportunity to teach kids all about spiders! Grab one of those decorative skeletons and see if your kids can name the essential body parts. Or, host a fun Halloween-themed shadow puppet show and explain to kids how the sun changes throughout the day and affects shadows!

8. Paint Spooky Rocks

Take a trip to the backyard and collect a few smooth stones or rocks! Have your kids transform them with ghost or zombie faces, or make them cute little pumpkins? Find a kit with everything you need online, or purchase googly eyes, paint, and some paint brushes and find your own rocks! You can take the painted rocks back into the backyard or even hide them around your neighborhood or a local park for others to find.

9. Turn Your Living Room Into a Haunted House

See how creative you can get at home! This could be especially fun with older kids with an enormous imagination. Spider webs, eerie colored lighting, fog machines are just a few possibilities. You’d be surprised at the life-like ghosts (no pun intended) you can create with some cheesecloth, chicken wire, and the perfect lighting!

We hope that this list encourages you to get creative this year!

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