Halloween 2015

Halloween 2015

If you are familiar with this blog, you will know that our family really tends to get into the Halloween season.

I prefer the subtle and mysterious rather than the blood-and-gore approach to Halloween spookiness.

We have moved into a new neighbourhood with many more children, so I plan to set up the Mad Scientist station in the driveway again this year. This is not to be confused with the company of the same name!

In the past, we have had a couple of Jack O'Lanterns set up with dry ice, and had kids mix their own homemade play dough (for younger kids) or silly putty to keep as their Halloween treat in labelled freezer bags.

This year, I plan to add to it by doing  a little more with the dry ice (cabbage water and dish soap, screaming spoons, etc.). I also found this simple physics trick to share with kids (I will call the water "possessed" or haunted). In this trick, you use the properties of refraction and reflection to reverse the direction of an arrow drawn on a card behind a glass of water. 
On a similar theme, I'll have a bicycle pump available to make a cloud in a bottle (aka "Ghost in a Bottle") using rubbing alcohol and a 2 litre plastic bottle.

I'd love to do more in the way of activities, but many kids are in a hurry that night. Sometimes it can be hard to compete with a sugar rush!

For decor, we may make plastic wrap and packing tape ghosts lit with cool-white LED Christmas lights to decorate the lawn and veranda too. Perhaps they will be emerging from graves.

I'd like to make a model owl with glowing eyes to sit in our lonely tree out front and/or a way to make our tree look possessed (eyes, make branches look like hands etc.). I have yet to find an idea that I like for these though.

I have a 20+ year old "spooky music" cassette tape I've been using that I really should update. In researching music for it, I found an easier Halloween music solution. There are many live streaming options available with a quick internet search. All you need to do is choose the one that suits your crowd and function best. Here's one I found, but really, there are many options out there!

While that goes on, we will rotate so that two of us from our family will also be canvassing the neighbourhood for Halloween for Hunger to collect non-perishable items for the local food bank. Be sure to have food items handy for such drives in your area! Click on the superhero image for more information.

More Halloween party ideas from past years:
http://lemonadebyll.blogspot.ca/2010/10/great-green-halloween-tips.html
http://lemonadebyll.blogspot.ca/2013/09/planning-ahead-for-halloween.html
http://lemonadebyll.blogspot.ca/2011/10/halloween-science.html

On the website, http://llemonade.com/halloween, there are many more activities and links to match the season as well.