You know Halloween is creeping up on you when those supermarket aisles start filling up with pumpkins, vampire capes and witches broomsticks. Trick or Treat time seems to be getting more and more popular every year, including Halloween parties for the kids. So if you happen to be having one, or are helping out at a friend’s party, here’s a few spooky and kooky themed game ideas from Soreen.
Pumpkin Popping Mayhem
This game takes some preparation time, but it’s well worth the effort. Start by picking up a large (5ft by 4ft approx) piece of foamboard or cardboard from a craft shop or online. Get 30 or so bright orange balloons and fill them using a funnel with confetti, glitter, small sweets and similar tiny treats – but leave a few treats free to add to the fun. Inflate the balloons with the aid of a balloon pump, and fix them to the board in a pumpkin shape using pins or white tack. Finally, cut a pumpkin stem shape from green paper and add to the top of your giant balloon pumpkin. At a suitable climactic point in your party let the kids loose to pop as many balloons as they can in as short a time as possible. Loads of fun, but allow for a little bit of a mess!!
The bowl of horror
Fill a number of small glass bowls with stuff that feels creepy, slimy and gross – but isn’t really – then blindfold each kid and ask them to describe what they’re touching as they dip into ‘the bowl of horror’. Peeled grapes, cold spaghetti, mashed bananas, tinned plum tomatoes etc will all do the trick, helped along by suitably grotesque comments like ‘is it an Egyptian mummy’s eyeball or the ectoplasm of a ghost’?
What’s the time Mrs Witch
Remember that game you played when you were little, called ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf’? Well this is the same game with a Halloween twist. All you need is a large room or garden space and a witch’s hat and broom. Elect a child to be the witch, then stand them at one end of the room or garden, wearing the hat, holding the broom and with their back to the other kids. The children then all shout at once ‘What time is it Mrs Witch?’ and the ‘witch’ replies with a time, e.g. 4 o’clock and the kids then take that number of steps towards the witch. When the children get very close to the ‘witch’ she suddenly answers their question with a shouted ‘midnight’ and turns to grab the nearest child. Expect much screaming and hysteria at this point, despite the fact they all knew it was coming.
Guess the ghost
Put some creepy Halloween music on in the background and ask all the kids to sit in a big circle. One child is then chosen as ‘it’, blindfolded and told to walk around the circle touching the heads of the other kids. When the music suddenly stops, the child being touched on the head by ‘it’ at that precise point, must howl or wail or groan or make some other suitably monstrous sound. The child who is ‘it’ then has to guess from this sound the name of the kid they’re touching. If they guess correctly, they swap places, if not, ‘it’ carries on being ‘it’.
Well there you go, a few game ideas guaranteed to help little monsters enjoy a frighteningly good party. And don’t forget, even Soreen are Halloween themed at this time of year, so our tasty little Scream Lunchbox Loaves in Toffee Apple and NEW Chocolate & Blood Orange flavours make perfect prizes for games or ideal hand-outs for Trick or Treaters.
