Homemade Halloween Decorations with Toddlers

If you're like me, and feel like the only way you could adequately decorate your home, given minimal skills in arts and crafts combined with a toddler hanging on you, it might seem just a bit too daunting to undertake creating your own homemade Halloween decorations. But it really doesn't have to be! This past weekend, I spent a couple of hours using my minimal skills and my toddler to create some really cute homemade Halloween decorations.

Handmade Ghost: Although I'm not particularly craft and art oriented, my daughter is. At not yet two, her skills are somewhat limited, but she really enjoys particular types of crafts, as do most small children. So for our first craft, we capitalized on this enjoyment by combining three of her favorite activities to create a handmade (you'll understand the joke soon) ghost.

For materials, you need a pencil, scissors, glue, white paper (we used computer paper, but white construction paper or oaktag would work better if you want something to hold up longer than a couple of weeks) and googly eyes. You can substitute googly eyes with black or red construction paper, or you could even draw eyes on.

First, I had her lay her hand down on the paper to trace it. The trick here is to align the fingers pretty close together, because the fingers are used as an outline for the bottom of the ghost. After tracing her hand, we cut the "ghost" out and glued on some googly eyes. This allowed her to help trace her hand (inexplicably one activity that comes up almost every day at her insistence), cut paper and glue on eyes, so it was a huge hit. The bonus is that, should the child get bored with tracing hands but you still want more ghosts, you can either use your own hand or you can use the first cut out as a model for subsequent ones. As a homemade Halloween decoration, you can place these throughout your home or, alternatively, hang them from a piece of yarn from hanging fixtures to create a spooky effect.

Handmade Spider:Our ghost was such a big hit that we decided to try a spider. It uses the same premise, but with a bit of a twist.