Halloween is just around the corner so I thought it would be fun to share an easy (and inexpensive) Halloween activity to do with your toddler or preschooler! For this craft all you need is an empty milk jug, black felt and velcro stickers. You can also use googly eyes, but it would be fine to make it without them, especially if it meant an extra trip to the store!
As I was cutting all the pieces to get ready Carter was very interested in what I was doing. I told him I was making a ghost for us to play with later and he then walked around the rest of the afternoon until nap-time pointing at the milk jug and saying “boo!” while smiling! He was excited to play with his ghost milk jug!
What to do:
- Be sure to wash and dry the milk jug before use. It would be best to let it dry overnight just to make sure any excess water is evaporated!
- Cut out your shapes for the ghost eyes and mouths. For older kids you could have them help you cut the shapes! I made two sets of eyes and 4 mouths to choose from. I glued the googly eyes onto the eye pieces, but you could also make them without.
- Stick the velcro dots onto each piece and three dots on the milk jug for each of the eyes and the mouth. The pieces are interchangeable so your kid can decide which eyes and mouth to use and experiment with moving them around!
I set the stage during naptime and placed the items out as an invitation to play. After his nap I showed him the activity but he wasn’t ready to play with it until after dinner!
After I showed him what to do, there was no stopping him! He loved taking the pieces off and moving them around.
We also created extra funny faces by piling the felt pieces on top of each other!
Eventually he decided to see how the pieces fit into the milk jug so we spent some time doing that and trying to remove them, which he found just as fun as making the faces.
You could also use this as an easy decoration for Halloween! You could glue the pieces on if you plan to use it for decoration, or even just use black paper to make your faces.
To go along with this activity it might be fun to read some books about Halloween and ghosts! Here are a few I found. Peek-a-Who is a book Carter loves, which has a page with a ghost on it that says boo!
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