The Ultimate Halloween Party

Last weekend, I hosted a Halloween party for eleven third graders. It was a blast! I was going to write a really lengthy post with all of the details of the party and the "how-to's" of party planning... but I decided you'd rather just look at the pictures. PLUS, I realized that I didn't snag pictures of ALL of the games, prizes and decorations (sometimes you just have to live in the moment!) so here are some of the highlights of the Ultimate Halloween Party.

When the children first arrived, I had three main areas for them to wander between. The first was a Zombie Warrior Training Zone. 

I set up some bales of hay and tied on balloons with Zombie faces drawn on them. I had a pile of sticks set next to the hay for the kids to pop the Zombies with and sharpen their swordsmanship.

Then I had a Can Knockdown game set up for the kids to test their strength. 

This game was a lot of fun to make! I recycled my cans and painted them as pumpkins, ghosts, black cats, Frankenstein's monster, and a mummy.

I also had a Craft Table set up. 

The Craft Table had three stations. At the first, the kids could decorate their treat bag with Halloween stickers, stamps, and markers. At the second, I had a Halloween Cootie Catcher (which I found here: http://catchmyparty.com/blog/free-halloween-party-printables-from-b-nute-productions) printed and cut out, ready for the kids to fold. The third was Halloween tattoos. Unfortunately, it was really windy the day of the party so I had to use rocks to hold everything down, but we managed to make it work.

Last, I had the Food Table. I tried to have a variety of snacks, all with a Halloween twist!

The Autumn Mix consisted of pretzel sticks, Chex corn cereal, Count Chocula cereal, M&M's, and a candy corn mix (with the pumpkins).

The spiders were made from peanut butter (I made sure there were no peanut allergies at the party), Ritz crackers, pretzel sticks, and chocolate chips.

For the first half hour of the party, I let the kids roam between the three areas. As I suspected, the boys spent most of their time in the Zombie Warrior Training Area (and running around) and the girls stayed closer to the Craft and Food Tables, but all of the kids did go back and forth between all of the areas. Once everyone had arrived and had a chance to run around, we started the games!

The first game is what I like to call the Pumpkin/Bozo/Grand Prize Game. Did you ever watch “The Bozo Show” when you were little? (Fun Fact: Bob Bell aka “Bozo the Clown” was a fellow Flint native.) Towards the end of the show, Bozo would pick a child to play the “Grand Prize Game” (If you aren’t familiar with it, you can watch a clip of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9IMebdCT6s). The game consisted of five buckets in a row and each bucket was associated with different prizes, getting bigger and better with each further bucket. The child would stand in front of the row of buckets and had to throw a ping pong ball into each bucket in order to get the prize associated with it.  This game was similar to the Grand Prize Game, but with a Halloween twist. 

I spray painted a long board black and screwed 5 plastic pumpkins into the board in a row.

I drew a chalk line on the cement where the kids were supposed to stand and had them line up behind it. I had 5 different prize buckets and let them choose prizes from each bucket that they were able to throw the ball into.

The game worked well, but I would recommend using a small bean bag instead of the ping pong ball.  The ping pong ball made the game a little too difficult for this age group.

The next game we played was Poke-A-Pumpkin. I've done a pinata for years (see my tutorial on how to make a pinata here) and have gotten tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I started searching Pinterest for an alternative to a pinata and found this gem. To make the game, I took an old canvas (you could easily use a foam board) and spray painted it black. I then hot glued orange cups onto the canvas. I then put different prizes and candy into each cup and covered it with tissue paper and a rubber band. The kids lined up and took turns poking a cup and taking the prize inside.

I wasn't sure how this game would go over with this age group because the game was so simple, but the kids loved it and I had enough cups for them to each go twice. Although the hot glue worked out alright, I would recommend using Epoxy glue. I think it would hold better.

The next game we played was the Wrap-A-Mummy game. I had the kids get into teams of two. We happened to have eleven kids at the party, so we made one of the teams have three kids. I then had them decide who the "Mummy" was going to be. I gave them a roll of toilet paper and told them that the first team to most carefully cover/wrap their mummy the fastest would win.

The kids did a great job with this game! I thought for sure that they would be running around each other throwing the toilet paper all over the other kid, but they were all very careful and took their time wrapping their mummy.

We also played two other really fun games but sadly, I didn't get any pictures of those games. Perhaps I'll save them for next year and tell you all about them then!

All of the kids appeared to have a really great time and I had a great time hosting! 

As always, thanks for reading and let me know if you end up having your own Ultimate Halloween Party!