I love Halloween at the library. If I’m working on Halloween (as I was this year) my coworker and I try to coordinate our costumes:

Guess who we were this year! I’m particularly proud of my salsa hat. 🙂 We got some ideas for our costumes here.

I created a couple new additions to the party this year. The first one was a poke-a-pumpkin board:

I got the design idea here. This was super simple and cheap! I got the poster board, Styrofoam cups, and tissue paper at Dollar Tree. We filled them with little things such as candy, erasers, stickers, plastic bugs, and any little items we had laying around.

We had a couple “big” prizes: a Star Wars prize pack and a free book that they got to pick from our collection. I wrote those prizes on small pieces of cardboard and stuck them in the cups since they wouldn’t fit otherwise. The girl who won the free book chose the sixth Bad Guys book. She was thrilled because she owned all of the others in the series except that one! Meant to be …

I also created our Boo Toss:

I got the idea for this guy from Oriental Trading. We already owned the containers and the balls. I colored the bottoms of the containers black with a Sharpie then I hot glued the cups on to the ghost for his eyes and mouth. I printed the letters out in color and glued them on the poster board (bought at Dollar Tree) with a glue stick! Super simple, quick and cheap.

Our last new addition was a jack o’lantern craft. We pre-cut 30 pumpkins and provided black triangle eyes and noses as well as white teeth and green stems. However, we also put out scraps of paper so the older kids could design their own pumpkins.

We also set out other items we’d already created in years past. My coworker had designed a scavenger hunt and some activity pages (word searches, spot the difference, mazes, etc.) so we re-used those. I put together an I Spy bottle last year so we set that up on a table:

We also reused the Captain Hook Ring Toss from Talk Like a Pirate Day.

And offered mummy bowling:

This set was purchased at Target years ago and we’ve gotten so much use out of it. I think they offered a version of it this year in their Boo & Eek Boutique …

We had about 130 people attend this year’s drop-in program . It was a great success!

And I have to continue the Halloween tradition of posting my little one in his costume:

Is that not the cutest Cat Boy you’ve ever seen??