Easy Halloween Crafts for Kids: 5 Projects in 15 Minutes (Nothing You Have to Buy)

Hey, y’all!

It is the first week of October. The school sends home a note about a costume parade, a fall party, and could you please send in a “festive craft item” by Friday. You read it standing at the counter with your keys still in your hand, and you realize you have not thought about Halloween for one single second. There is no orange construction paper in this house. There is no glitter glue. There is a stack of paper plates, a black marker that still works, and a recycling bin full of cereal boxes and paper-towel tubes.

Good. That is everything you need.

These are the easy Halloween crafts for kids that I have made at my own kitchen table for thirty-some years, first with four kids and now with seven grandkids. The rule for this whole post is simple: nothing you have to buy. No craft-store run, no kit, no waiting on a delivery. Paper plates, a marker, scissors, tape, and the recycling. Every craft here takes about 15 minutes, and every one of them makes something a kid wants to keep, which is the part most craft lists forget.

The rule that makes easy Halloween crafts actually easy

Here is the thing nobody tells you about kids’ crafts: the craft is not the hard part. The hard part is the long setup, the drive to the store for the one thing you are missing, and the cleanup that runs longer than the craft did.

So the rule at our house is that a craft has to pass three tests before it goes on the table:

• Everything is already in the house. If the supply list has one item we do not own, it is not this week’s craft.
• It is finished in 15 minutes. Not “started and abandoned.” Finished, on the fridge, hands washed.
• The kid wants to keep it. A craft that goes straight into the trash after school is forgotten by dinner. A craft that hangs on the wall for two weeks gets talked about for two weeks.

Every craft below passes all three, sorted by age band. Start where your kids are.

Want the printable side of this?

Two of our free kids printables pair up with these crafts: the Quiet-Time Coloring Sampler (eight big-shape pages for the kid who would rather color than cut) and the Cut-and-Color Critters (two animals with fold tabs that stand up once they are colored). Both are free on the Homefire free resources page. Or tell me where to send them, and every new kids printable we make this fall lands in your inbox first.

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Five easy Halloween crafts for kids, by age (15 minutes each)

Set the supplies out once on a cookie sheet, then pick the craft for the kid in front of you.

1. Littles (2–4): The paper-plate pumpkin

You need: one paper plate, an orange crayon or marker (or a brown one, and call it a pumpkin at dusk), a black marker, and a green leaf from the yard if you can find one.

Let them scribble the whole plate orange. All of it, edges included, however it comes out. That scribbling is the craft for a two-year-old, so do not rush it. When they are done, you draw two triangle eyes and a jagged mouth with the black marker, or hold their hand and draw it together. Tape the leaf to the top for a stem. Done.

What makes it keepable: tape it to the inside of the front door at their eye level. Every time somebody comes in, the pumpkin gets noticed, and the kid gets to say “I made that” forty times before Halloween.

2. Early Elementary (5–7): The paper-plate ghost

You need: one paper plate, kid scissors, the black marker, tape, and a strip of anything white and floppy from the house: a paper napkin, a strip of white paper, a bit of a plastic grocery bag.

Draw a big wavy line across the bottom third of the plate and let them cut along it. That wavy cut is the whole ghost; the wobbles are what make it look right. They draw two big oval eyes and an “oh” mouth. Tape the white strips underneath so they hang and flutter. Punch a hole at the top (grown-up job) and hang it from the doorknob with string or a shoelace.

What makes it keepable: it moves. A ghost that flutters when the front door opens is worth ten flat ones.

3. Big Kids (8–10): Cardboard-tube bats and mummies

You need: paper-towel or toilet-paper tubes from the recycling, the black marker, scrap paper, tape, and for the mummies, a strip of toilet paper or paper towel.

For a bat: color the tube black with the marker (or leave it brown and call it a barn bat, which is a real thing, and Big Kids like a real thing). Fold the top edges in to make two pointy ears. Cut two wings from a cereal-box flap and tape them to the back. Marker eyes. For a mummy: wrap the tube loosely in a strip of paper towel, tape the end, and draw two eyes peeking out between the wraps.

What makes it keepable: they stand up on their own. Big Kids want to make a lot of something, so let them; a row of five bats along the windowsill is decor, not a craft, and the tubes are free.

4. Tweens (11–12): The cereal-box haunted house

You need: one empty cereal box, the black marker, scissors, tape, and a flashlight or a phone light.

Open the box flat, turn it printed-side in, and tape it back together so the plain cardboard faces out. Draw a house on the big front panel: a peaked roof, crooked windows, a door hanging off one hinge. Cut out the windows (a grown-up starts the first cut; a tween can finish). Draw a black cat in one window, a ghost in another. Now set the flashlight inside and turn off the kitchen light.

What makes it keepable: it glows. Tweens are past being impressed by a paper plate, but not past being impressed by a light inside a house they built. This one moves to their bedroom windowsill and stays until November.

5. Teens (13–15) and Older Teens (16+): The window silhouette scene they run for the little ones

You need: a few sheets of any paper, the black marker, scissors, tape, one window, and a lamp.

Teenagers do not want to make a paper-plate anything, and I would not ask them to. What they will do is be in charge. Hand a teen the marker and the job of turning the front window into a silhouette scene: a crooked tree, a fence, a cat on the fence, a moon, a couple of bats. They draw the shapes heavy, cut them out, tape them to the inside of the glass, and set a lamp behind it so the whole thing shows up black against gold from the street.

Then put the Littles and the Early Elementary crowd under their direction. “Cut this bat out for me.” “Color this moon.” A teen who runs the table for 15 minutes has done a craft, whether they call it one or not, and the younger kids get a big sibling’s full attention, which is rarer than any decoration.

What makes it keepable: the neighbors see it. That is the only kind of keepable a teenager cares about.

The wall-art version: draw it heavy enough to hang

Some of the best easy Halloween crafts for kids are not crafts at all. They are drawings, done a certain way, so that the finished page looks good enough to frame instead of good enough to fold up and lose.

The trick is the outline. Before the kid colors anything, one of you draws the shape in thick black marker: a fat pumpkin, a sitting black cat, a moon with three bats across it, a candy-corn triangle. Heavy lines, simple shapes, nothing fussy. Then the kid colors inside. When it is done, the black outline holds the whole picture together, and even a scribbled-orange pumpkin looks like it was meant to look that way.

Tape three of these in a row down the hallway and you have Halloween decorating that cost nothing and that your kids made. If you are wondering how the kids’ gallery fits next to the grown-up stuff, my guide to decorating for Halloween with a family in the house covers it: kids’ art at kid height, the rest above it.

The kids printable activities library has a free coloring sampler with exactly these big, open shapes if you would rather print the outlines than draw them, and the fall pages are the next ones landing there.

The rainy-Saturday stack: solve the afternoon before it starts

The reason Halloween crafts happen at some houses and not at others is not talent, and it is not time. It is whether the supplies were already together when somebody said “I’m bored.”

So on a Sunday night in October, take 15 minutes and build the stack. One shoebox or one gallon bag:

• Ten paper plates
• The black marker (test it first; a dead marker ends the craft before it starts) and whatever orange, brown, and green crayons are still in the drawer
• Kid scissors and a roll of tape
• Five or six clean tubes and one flattened cereal box from the recycling
• A few strips of white paper or paper towel, already torn

Put the box on the shelf where the board games live. The next rainy Saturday, you hand it over and say “pick one.” Past-you already handled it.

Want some paper in the box too? Our free Fall Art Pack has four pumpkin decorating sheets and four leaf pages, so a kid can design a pumpkin on paper before anybody takes a knife to the real one. Print a few and tuck them in with the plates.

If you want the stack to last past Halloween, this is where the 52 Screen-Free Activity Cards earn their spot in the box. They are $9, they cover every season, and a kid who draws a card and does it has solved her own boredom without asking you to. The Boredom Buster Jar pack does the same job for the coloring-page crowd. More free ideas along the same lines are in our easy paper crafts for kids post and the screen-free activities post.

When it goes sideways (because it will)

Here is how these actually go. The three-year-old will color the pumpkin purple. Let her. A purple pumpkin on the front door is a story you will tell for years. The seven-year-old will cut the ghost in half by accident and be devastated. Tape it back together from behind, tell him ghosts are supposed to be see-through, and move on. The ten-year-old will make one bat, declare it “fine,” and leave. One bat is a finished craft. The tween will say the haunted house is babyish right up until the flashlight goes in, and then quietly carry it to her room. And the teenager will roll his eyes at the whole thing and then spend the rest of the evening on the window because the neighbor’s kid came over to look.

None of that is the craft failing. That is the craft working. Some afternoons the whole thing is four minutes and one plate, and that is a season, not a failure. Done is better than perfect, and a paper-plate ghost taped to the pantry door is done.

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Back to that note from school

So it is the first week of October, and the note says “festive craft item by Friday.” You put your keys down. You pull out a paper plate and the marker. Fifteen minutes later there is a pumpkin with a leaf for a stem sitting on the counter, and a kid who wants to know if she can make another one for Grandma.

That is the whole thing, y’all. Not a craft-store trip, not a kit, not a Saturday. A plate, a marker, the recycling bin, and 15 minutes at the table with your kid. It is enough, and they will remember it longer than anything you could have bought.

You don’t have to be perfect — tend the home fire, in the minutes you have.

Keep tending the fire, y’all.

Robin

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Want a little more help with this? When the glue dries and they start circling you again, the Homefire Boredom Buster Activity Pack keeps the next thirty ideas ready to go.