Halloween Craft

On Friday a couple weeks ago I made the sudden and (brave, for me) decision that we needed to get some materials for Halloween crafts.  Tommy and George and I went for a bike ride and stopped by the dollar store.  11 dollars later, we were stocked and ready for the troops.  When the boys came home from school and after lunch (well, in Owen's case, he couldn't wait to get started and couldn't be bothered with lunch) They got to work.  I was actually surprised in their responses--William was excited about crafts, Ry wasn't.  This is a switch from earlier in life.  Tommy stuck with the crafts longer than I ever remember him doing, which was also a fun change.  George was very interested and engaged, which was another great surprise.  I ended up feeling like we could actually do this more often!!

I bought little styrofoam balls which they designed however they wanted and stuck pipe cleaners in for the legs.  Then they had fun hanging them around the house.  William hung his from my violin door frame (to scare all the students).  The other boys found places upstairs.  Tommy became very excited about hanging his on the door to his bedroom.  He also wanted to put up a sign to warn visitors.  He originally said he wanted to write "Spider Please Come In."  After discussing this with him for a while (I was fairly confused by his intent), we re-worded it to say "Beware the Spider!)  After taping the sign on the door, he said, "Now we need the Voice!)  Then he went into the room and said, "Knock!"  So we knocked.  Then he said, "...Wait, what does the sign say?"  We told him.  Then he said, "Beware the spider" in a spooky voice and gave an evil laugh.  It was very entertaining!  Georgie made a very cute baby spider.  His favorite thing to do was to pull the string out.  :-)

Then we moved on to Jack-O-Lanterns.  This was where Will branched off to his own devices.  He didn't want to do a pumpkin, so instead he created a door knocker Frankenstein head.  Very clever, he made it up himself.  He also made some bats out of the black foam we bought.

Owen had me hang his spider from the front entrance light.  He included "spinnerets" on his spider--two little pieces of pipe cleaner.  Owen made another awesome spider with feathers coming out of its head and brought it down to my violin room.

R, O, T, and G decorated the pumpkin shapes I had drawn on a posterboard.  Then we put them all on our 

front window.

After that, mostly everyone was done.  While I was up putting G down for a nap, Owen started trying to figure out how to make a spider web for his spinneret spider.  He was knotting string together so nicely, he noticed that he could turn it into a bracelet, which he did.  :-)  So there's still no web, but he's thinking about making a snowflake-type web.

Overall I think our craft day was quite a success!  I thoroughly enjoyed watching the boys create, and it was really nice spending all that time together.  Note to self--we can do this again!!