Halloween Countdown: Monster Bowling

One week 'til Halloween!! Who's excited?? Obviously me ;)

I'm also excited to introduce my Halloween Countdown post series! For the next week, I'll share a post a day with a toddler-friendly Halloween-themed play idea. Thanks for checking it out!

Calvin has a little play bowling set which he loves, so he was into this monster-themed bowling set we made together. 

Materials:

6 toilet paper tubes*

paper

scissors

glue (possibly a stapler...)

ball

optional: washi tape or masking tape

*You could also use paper towel tubes, disposable water bottles, or pretty much any other cylindrical objects you have lying in your recycling bin. Also, obviously it doesn't have to be six... you could do a full set of 10 pins, or however many cylinders you can find ;)

First I made all the face pieces for the monsters using scrapbook paper. I drew a bunch of eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hair/hats and cut them out ahead of time. If this sounds like way too much work, they also make stickers of face parts that you can probably find at a craft store. Or with an older kid, you could just draw faces onto the tubes. 

Then I helped Calvin put the monster faces together on the tubes. I had seen this method of putting glue on a sponge for the kid to press on and I tried it out, but maybe I didn't do it right... I wouldn't recommend it, at least the way I did it, because I had to add so much glue as the sponge soaked it up that it felt like we were wasting glue. Next time, I'd just put glue on a paper plate. Or look up that sponge thing and figure out how it's actually supposed to work...

I ended up using a stapler to attach the hair and hats.

When all the monsters were made, we let them dry overnight.

To set up our bowling lane, I used washi tape to mark where Calvin should stand, and the spots for each of our monster bowling pins. It was nice to have the places for the pins marked so that Calvin could reset them himself.

We used a bouncy ball small enough for Calvin to palm.

Calvin's bowling strategy is to roll the ball, see how many monsters he knocked down, and then walk over and kick the rest of the monsters over! #cheating Then as we reset the monsters, we count them in the voice of the Count on Sesame Street... Six! Six monsters! A-a-a-a-aaaah!

Even Henry can bowl! With some help ;)

Happy Monster Bowling!

Come back to check out the other posts in this series :)

What are you guys doing to get ready for Halloween?