Messy Ghost Painting

With a very rainy morning and two toddlers to entertain, I decided that a project was just the thing we needed.  I searched one of my favorite blogs for Halloween ideas and came upon this fabulous puffy paint ghost. I had shaving cream in my art supply cabinet from summer art, and still have half a gallon of white glue, so this was a project that didn’t require any new supplies!

To start off, I had both girls (in paint shirts) mix a bowl of shaving cream and glue together while I drew large outlines of ghost on a brown paper bag.  Then I put the outlines down and the girls finger painted them all over.


There was not a clean hand in the house! After it was smeared everywhere, we added some googlie eyes and a construction paper mouth that I had cut out. Then we let them dry for a couple of hours.

When they were dry, I cut them out along the lines that I had drawn earlier (although they weren’t very visible at this point) and we hung them up so they could spook the house!

Nancy just loves to go over and touch her ghost because the “paint” dries fluffy and soft. I’m thinking we’ll have to do this again for snowmen soon!

October Sensory Bin of the Month

Okay, so I’ll admit it.  October has gotten away from me.  Between a whirlwind trip to Disneyland, family visiting the weekend after that, dinners with friends, Adam and I’s twelfth anniversary, taking a stained glass class, and of course the usual school days, I haven’t gotten to blog.  But, in case you’re looking for halloween inspiration, here are some posts from the past (and by the way, I found a similar disclaimer for every October that I’ve been blogging for–apparently Octobers are notoriously busy).  And I’ll have a new post up in the next couple of days.

• Beaded Pumpkins
• Pumpkin Spiders
• Halloween Stained Glass
• Pumpkin Lanterns
• Bat Cookies

And also, in the meantime, I wanted to share these fabulous spider webs that my sister made with a group of toddlers last week.  Super easy and fun.  Do you see the glow in the dark spider hanging out on the web?  They are marble painting with white paint on black paper plates.

Finally, all month we’ve been playing with this super fun sensory bin. It is full of red lentils, white beans, and black beans, little halloween bugs, snakes, bat, spiders, etc. from Dollar tree, some little black and orange cups, random spoons, and then my girls decided that the pompoms were a must, although I’m not sure how they fit in with the Halloween theme.