Looking for an easy Halloween project for the kids? Something quick, easy, mess free? I’ve got the perfect kids pumpkin decorating project!
This weekend we went to a local farm/pumpkin patch. Among the chaos and crowds, we found some really nice medium-ish pumpkins for the kids to decorate. I spent all last week thinking about the project and collecting supplies for the kids to decorate their own pumpkins.
Pumpkins are awesome and so are jack-o-lanterns. I love letting my kids play with the pumpkin guts before we extract the seeds from the pulp and roast them. But pumpkin carving is really an adult job and kids usually end up as planners (deciding what the face should look like) and spectators. This year I wanted my kids to be involved with the decorating, making their own pumpkin creations that they could proudly display.
So I gathered the following items:
- Halloween foam stickers
- Halloween velvet stickers (which they colored)
- Sequins of various shapes and sizes
- Small fake flowers removed from the stems
- Fabric leaves
- Sequin pins (found at any craft or fabric store)
Then we cleaned off our pumpkins from the patch and I let the kids have at it, decorating as they wished.
The girls spent close to an hour decorating their pumpkins. Painstakingly inserting the little pins to attach the sequins and peeling the stickers and placing them just right.
Even Doodle stickered his own pumpkin. He wasn’t too sure about the super sticky foam stickers at first (they kept getting stuck on his hands) but he loved the “smooshing” part once they were on the pumpkin and by the end was selecting, placing and smooshing his own stickers. (On a side note: stickers are one of my favorite toddler activities. They are great for developing fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and cause and effect plus nothing is funnier than watching a toddler fight with a sticker!)
At the end of the decorating, each kid had his or her own pumpkin that s/he decorated completely on his/her own to be proud of and it was tons of fun for us adults to sit back and watch too!
