Halloween Countdown: Batty Zip-lines

Halloween is tomorrow y'all!! Happy Halloween Eve ;)

And THE GIANTS WON THE WORLD SERIES!!! Woo hoo! So proud of my home team!

Ok back to Halloween. I may have gone a little batty myself when I dreamed this one up... Here's today's Halloween-themed play idea: Batty Zip-lines!

My original idea was to do a zip-line with ghosts. But then I felt like that might be hard to explain to Calvin and possibly a little scary for him... so I went with bats. A totally real nocturnal mammal that happens to be associated with Halloween. Very science-y. Completely legit. Bats it is!

Teacher friends, this would have been much easier if I'd had access to a die-cut machine. As it was, I had to draw a bat shape myself. It turned out totally decent. Kind of like the Batman's bat symbol... maybe that is because I slept through watched (half of) (ok, a third of) the old school Michael Keaton Batman movie the night before I made these.

I drew & cut out a bat using scrap paper, then took a piece of Halloween scrapbook paper and folded it in half "like a hot dog" - teacher friends, you guys reading this?? ;) - and traced the bat onto the scrapbook paper.

That gave me two cute little bats! (It's the same paper, it has a different pattern on each side.) For the lines I used regular party ribbon because I have this giant spool of it. And at first I was going to attach the end of the line to a wall or shelf or something, but then I got the idea to put knots or knobs on the end of the string so we could just hold the zip-lines without having to re-thread the bats. So, yes, those are the caps from squeeze-packs of toddler/baby food... the caps that the packaging specifically tells you to keep away from the kiddies because they are choking hazards... Um, we use them anyway for color sorting and stuff and they worked well for this. Just don't let your kids put them in their mouths OK?! You could also use big beads or buttons or tie big knots. And don't let your kids put the beads or buttons in their mouths either ;) 

I cut the straw into pieces and taped one on each bat body. Then I threaded a length of string through each one and tied a cap to each end of string. I made one longer one that Calvin and I can use together, and one short one that he can play with by himself.

Here's Calvin checking out the little one.

And here's the best I could do for a pic of us using the big one...

Henry thought the Batty Zip-line was pretty sweet too.

And I think James and Hartley liked it even more than the kids. (World Series post game is on in the background :))

Later, James was trying to think of ways to add weight to the bats to make them fly even faster. There was also talk of attaching a balloon to propel the bat... Lots of science-y stuff that you could tie into this one!


Here are more posts from this series of Halloween-themed play ideas:

Monster Bowling

Funny Felt Monsters

Perfect Pour Pumpkins

Spooky Sensory Bottles

Spiders in Shaving Cream

Jello-ween Sensory Play