Halloween stuff for the chitlins

strebalicious

So we are going to throw a small little Halloween party for an orphanage over here in Japan. Children range from 3-18 or so. So I need to come up with some events to do for the different age ranges to do that would be good for 3 or 4 hours. So what should we do to bring some good old American holiday ingenuity to the Japanese? Keep in mind we need to find stuff that can be done indoors.

Ideas so far:
- Costume Contest
- Pumpkin Carving
- Bobbing for Apples
- Mummy Wrap with toilet paper

Rainbulimic

There's a game based on grossing the kids out by getting labelled boxes (that you can't see inside) with holes in and getting them to put their hands in and feel the things inside.
E.g. peeled grapes - "eye balls"
Peeled oranges or something - "kidneys"
Spaghetti in water or fake blood - "worms" or "witches hair" or whatever you want...
Small wet/hard peas - "spiders eggs"
Etc

You see where I'm going with this... Its icky and good fun at creeping people out.

Susan Delgado

Are there any rooms or spaces that can be turned into a "haunted house" or something similar?

Also, any way to make caramel apples? I remember doing that at school...and then decorating your apple with sprinkles or marshmallows, or chocolate chips and whatnot.

VisionOfClarity

The worry with caramel and candy apples usually is that you have to melt the caramel/candy and it gets quite hot so you have to worry about the kids hurting themselves.


There are cake pans that look like Jack O'Lanterns, ghosts and other things that you could make cupcakes with ahead of time and have the kids decorate though. Get some icing tubes and all that jazz.

Susan Delgado

Yeah, VoC, that's definitely a concern. Don't want the kiddies getting hurt. Our teachers actually dipped the apples for us and then we picked out the one we wanted from the cooling rack when they were still warm but not too hot to the touch. Maybe the older kids could help the little ones with something like that?

The cake idea is awesome. Do they have "funfetti" type cake mix there? Or you could probably make your own with some yellow cake (or whatever flavor) and those little bat and candy corn shaped sprinkles.

VisionOfClarity

The older teens could definitely help the little kids I bet. Or you could just restrict it to the older kids.


You could do the decorating thing with shaped sugar cookies too! Just get the big cookie cutters if possible so there's more room to decorate.


If you can't do pumpkin carving (giving kids knives or other sharp instruments (you're not in the US so they might not be as anal there but here that would be shot down) you can decorate them with glitter, glue, paint, markers, etc.


Rainbulimic's suggestion is often accompanied by a scary story of some type so you could always expand and do scary stories of varying degrees based on age groups present (do sessions for 3-5, 6-10, 11-13, 13-18 or something).


Having someone there to paint faces is always loved by kids, even if it's not Halloween related.


You could always get some brown paper bags or something and have the kids decorate them for trick or treating bags and then have various rooms/stations set up for trick or treating.

ceres

You can probably make up an appropriately themed scavenger hunt that would be fun. This gets better the bigger the area you've got to work with.