I volunteered to help with N2's preschool party at school. They were invited to preschool even though they don't go to preschool on Halloween so I was extremely glad that they had a fun party to attend! Along with another mom, I planned games for the class to play. The first one was a build a monster game. I cut a monster face out of felt and the cut different shapes for the body parts on the face. There were 15 kids so I had to have 15 different body parts! I ended up with 3 eyes, a nose, 2 ears, a mouth, 2 sets of teeth, one long eyebrow, 5 horns and hair. I did an extra part in case there was another kid. Here's what our monster looked like. (The teacher said she would make a felt board but I got there on Halloween and she said it wasn't dry so we had to use this board that she had!)
Then we played pumpkin bowling. The other mom made this game. She bought toilet paper rolls and put black eyes on them to make them look like ghosts. We used a small pumpkin as the ball. I didn't get pictures because I was the one on the floor setting up the toilet paper rolls after the kids would knock them down. They had a lot of fun. Each kid only got one turn though as we only had 1 bowling set. After this game it was snack time. I made witch broomsticks with cheese and pretzel sticks.
I included both so you could see that I had to use singles because the white cheese I chose was a pain and you can see that I tried different ways to make the brooms! I thought these would be easy but they were NOT! I bought slices of white square American cheese at the deli. The person cut one slice for me and I folded it and rolled it and it didn't crack. I thought "perfect!" I had found slightly thicker pretzel sticks that I thought would work better. I started making these after dinner time the night before the party. I cut the slice of cheese in half. The cheese immediately cracked and fell apart when I tried to wrap it. Brian suggested that I let the cheese warm up. So I did. That seemed to help a little but it still cracked before I could tie it with a chive. And let me tell you about the chives. I would get a broom made and try to tie it and the chive would snap in two before I even got it tied. I searched the internet to find out what kind of cheese people used and if there was a technique I was missing because the site I found off pinterest just told me to roll the cheese and tie. Someone suggested using cream cheese. So I slathered cream cheese on the bottom of the pretzel and then stuck pieces of cheese on. That kind of worked but then I had to put more cream cheese on top of the pieces of cheese to get more pieces on top. Very labor intensive. I decided to try string cheese because some people had used that. Well my pretzel sticks were too big so it just made the cheese break apart when I tried to insert the pretzel stick in. So I shredded the cheese and used cream cheese to stick it. That was better than the American cheese but still a pain. Kraft had a video tutorial on how to make them and they used singles. So I tried singles. That did work better because the cheese was more pliable but it still cracked. I finally got enough made so each kid could have 2 but it took me quite a long time and quite a few choice words. I was ready to run to the store and buy smaller pretzel sticks and insert those into string cheese. I would NOT recommend making these! All the adults at the party loved them though!
Then we read books. The teacher asked for a volunteer to read books and she called my attention to it so that I would sign up. I read the kids Over in the Hollow and Big Green Monster. The first one is to the tune of Over in the Meadow. My kids love when I sing books to them so I decided to sing that book at preschool and have the kids help me make the noises and do actions with the story. They mostly sat nicely. I think there was one boy who wasn't paying attention but the rest were! Then we had a Halloween parade. We played two more Halloween games after that-Hot Pumpkin and Ghost Drop. Hot Pumpkin is played just like hot potato but whoever had the pumpkin when the music stopped had to make a Halloween noise. The kids were not good about passing quickly. They just wanted to hold the pumpkin!
Ghost Drop is where the kids have to hold a clothespin by their nose and try to drop it into a pumpkin bucket. I painted clothespins white and put eyes on with sharpie. The kids did it once and then had enough. I think they were tired of playing games by that point. At the end the teacher had them do Bozo buckets and they could pick out prizes from each bucket.
We had a fun time but I sure was tired after the party!
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