Halloween-Inspired Activities for Kids

Dance, bake, and create to bring music to life! These activities will allow your child to have a fun, musical, and spooky Halloween!

Fall Tastes and Sounds: Recipes & Rhythms Inspired by Music

Family bonds are made through shared experiences. Enjoy everything the season has to offer with an evening of cooking fall-inspired recipes and listening to music together as a family! Singing, whistling, or even listening can make hard work more enjoyable—and allowing children to physically respond to music helps to develop critical thinking and listening skills.

During one of the recipes that require stirring, try making the work a little more fun by using motions that reflect two contrasting musical styles: legato (pronounced luh-GAHT-toh) and staccato (pronounced stah-CAHT-toh). Listen to the audio clips below and ask your child to stir using motions that reflect the style of the music they hear. Ask questions so they can interpret the differences in style for themselves. Go back and forth between the two so they can compare and contrast.


Use smooth and connected strokes while stirring, like the legato music.


Use short and separated strokes while stirring, like the staccato music.

You’ll hear those two types of musical styles and others represented throughout Danse macabre. Play the whole piece of music, and alter your stirring strokes based on the style of music you hear:

Listen on Spotify

Fun Halloween Recipes involving stirring:

Trick-or-Treat Pancakes
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Candy Corn Cupcakes
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Spooky Red Velvet Cupcakes
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Monster Plant Cupcakes
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Spooky Character Craft and Play: Make Shadow Puppets!

Love crafts and music? Create shadow puppets and use them to dance along with music to let their spookiness soar!

You’ll need just a couple of materials from around the house to craft your shadow puppets and a stage.

Make Your Spooky Character:

Choose either the shadow puppet craft or the coloring pages to create your spooky characters.

Shadow Puppets

There are five shadow puppet patterns. Make one or all of them! Click through the slides below for instructions and patterns.

Make your spooky characters dance:

Once you have your spooky characters ready, grasp the stick and hold it up to a blank wall or other flat surface. Shine a flashlight (or other light source) onto your shadow puppet so its shadow appears on the wall. This works best in a dark room. Turn on the music from one of these pieces and move your characters to the music, letting the music bring your characters to life! Listen on Spotify

For inspiration, here is an example of using the shadow puppets to tell a story with the music but use your imagination and do whatever you think feels right. You can do this alone or with others!

 

Make a stage for your puppets (optional):

Setting up a stage for your shadow puppets can make for an even more spooky performance. Use a box and a few other materials shown below to set up a stage.

Making Spooky Characters Funny: Write Your Own Lyrics!

 
The Halloween season is filled with characters that can be very spooky—maybe even too spooky for some kids. “Down by the Bay” is a great song to help break the ice and make Halloween characters fun and less scary. First, listen to or sing along with the song in this video.

“Have you ever seen a mouse building a house?” “Have you ever seen a bee sipping iced tea?”

Those are silly—you would never see those types of things! What are ways that you can make spooky Halloween characters do something silly in this song? Halloween characters can include pirates, skeletons, ghosts, witches, or trolls.

Use this worksheet to help make your own Halloween-inspired lyrics for “Down by the Bay.” You can print it out to write in the lyrics by hand, or type right into the PDF.

After you’ve created your lyrics, we have a few more suggestions for singing this song together with your family:

  • To make the song even more Halloween-y, you can trade out the word “watermelons” for “pumpkins” (“Down by the bay, where the pumpkins grow”)
  • The song can be sung in unison—all together, without the echo—or you can have one person lead and the others echo: call-and-response style, like you heard in the video.

The Magic of Conducting

Find your perfect wand and learn the magic of conducting! Your guide for Ghost, Ghouls & Goblins activities, Juan Sebastian Cruz, will help you along the way.

Want to feel even more magical conducting? Dress in your Hogwarts House colors, grab your wand, or throw on your wizard robe! If you are not sure which Hogwarts House you would be sorted into, take a quiz and find out. Continue practicing your magical conducting skills by using another piece on this playlist!

Life of a Pirate:
Scavenger Hunt + Imagination Warm-Up

Ahoy, me Hearties! Take a scavenger hunt around your house to find the tools you’ll need aboard your ship. Then, your guide to Ghost, Ghouls & Goblins activities, Juan Sebastian Cruz, will take you on the ultimate pirate adventure.

Once you’ve gotten into the mood with Juan, listen to the Pirates of the Caribbean medley from this playlist.

Want to feel even more like a pirate? Learn phrases you can use! You’ll be talking like a true buccaneer in no time.

Dancing like Ghosts and Skeletons: “Danse macabre”

Glide like a ghost and dance like a skeleton! Join your Ghost, Ghouls & Goblins activities guide, Juan Sebastian Cruz, in this activity using melodies in Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre.

Once you’ve learned the movements for the two main melodies in Danse macabre, get ready to put your moves into action while listening to this music!

Listen on Spotify

 
Have you made shadow puppets from the “Spooky Character Craft and Play” activity? Grab your skeleton and ghost shadow puppets to glide or dance along with your movements!

Galloping with the Headless Horseman

Ready for a spooky story? Join your guide for Ghost, Ghouls & Goblins activities, Juan Sebastian Cruz, to get ready to hear the Ride of the Headless Horseman. Move along with the galloping sounds you hear in the second video!

Listen to the Headless Horseman

Move along with the galloping sounds you hear in the second video!

 

Enjoy Scary Movies?

If your family enjoys scary stories, here are a few kid-friendly versions of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to learn more about the Headless Horseman:

Activities Guide - Juan Sebastian Cruz

Juan Sebastian Cruz graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in Visual and Dramatic Arts. Since then he has enjoyed a varied career in the arts all across Houston. Notable theater credits include performances with the Alley Theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre, Theatre Under The Stars, Houston Symphony and Houston Grand Opera. As a musician, dancer, and circus artist he has performed at venues such as Miller Outdoor Theater, Jones Hall, Discovery Green, and the Texas Renaissance Festival. He works as a Teaching Artist with students across the city and is always excited about the opportunity to engage with eager young audiences.

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