Top 10 Quick and Easy Kid Activities For Those Long Weekends
With the holidays quickly approaching, it's likely that you'll have some unscheduled 'down-time' with your child where you don't have anything actually planned. Just because you don't have any planned activities with your child doesn't mean that they have to languish on the couch in boredom. Take a look at these quick and easy anytime activities.

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Thanksgiving Crafts and Activities at Kid Crafts Magazine
The latest edition of Kid Crafts Magazine is out and full of great crafts and activities for Thanksgiving. It's got a turkey hat, paper plate turkey, pilgrim crafts, and even some more challenging crafts for bigger kids. This edition also has some great links for planning a harvest party for a classroom party and tips to being a room mother.


Halloween Safety Pin Patterns
Creating friendship pins has become very popular for school age kids over the last few years. They are fairly easy to make and are a great way to show a friend that you value them. It has also become very popular for scouting groups and other similar clubs to swap pins with other groups.

Here you'll find the basic instructions for creating these pins from safety pins and beads. Once you get the idea, you can check out some of the individual Halloween designs.


Rattling Skeletons and Spaghetti Cobwebs as Halloween Crafts
Rattling Skeletons - Use white paper to form 5 paper chains, and then connect to make a skeleton... one chain is the body and the other four are arms and legs. Trace children's hands and feet on white paper, cut and glue to the ends of the arms and legs. Cut an oval shape and draw on the face.

Spaghetti Cobwebs - Cook some spaghetti and let it cool completely. Dip strands of spaghetti into white glue and arrange the pieces onto waxed paper. When the spaghetti dries, carefully peel the "cobweb" off the waxed paper.

Part 2 of The Halloween Crafts Edition
Kid Crafts Magazine came out with it's second half of the Halloween edition of the newsletter and it's full of even more Halloween crafts for kids. This new edition has a Ghost Backpack, Halloween Safety Pin Patterns, Ghost Writers, Rattling Skeletons, and Mummy Spoons... it's a lot of fun!

If you're planning to have a Halloween Party, you might also want to think about having a Mystery Party! These party kits have everything you need to have your very own Mystery Party... and it's all downloadable so you can get the kit today and begin planning your mystery party tonight!


Great Free Halloween Party Ideas
I have a great resource with tons of original ideas for throwing a memorable Halloween Party for younger children as well as a Frightfully Fun Halloween Party for Teens and Pre-teens... it's not as difficult as you may think!

Better yet, why not throw a mystery party! They are a lot of fun, have a great built in theme, and give your party a real purpose and direction... best of all, kids love mystery parties!


Candy Corn Pin Halloween Craft
A cute little Halloween pin made from fun foam with a pin back. This craft is very easy to do, even for the youngest kids. It also has a lot of variations you can use... for example, you could make it out of paper instead of fun foam or turn it into a necklace instead of a pin... it's all up to you. We also think this would make a great craft for a group of children like a girl scout craft or a classroom craft. The Candy Corn Pin Halloween craft comes complete with a printable template you can use to make it really easy!


Halloween Ghost Necklace Craft
We're working on the latest edition of Kid Crafts Magazine and finding great Halloween crafts to share with our subscribers and we found this fun Ghost Necklace craft for Halloween.

This halloween craft project idea actually appears on one of our other websites, where the idea for this project came from a mail order catalog where they sell craft kits. After we saw the picture of the craft, we decided that we could make our own. It is really easy, especially if you use the template we created for you! This is just a sneak peak of what's coming next week in the first of two Halloween magazine issues!


Coffee Filter Fall Leaves
Cut leaf shapes out of basket type coffee filters. Fill an ice cube tray with water and then put a few drops of food coloring in each of the sections (orange, red, yellow, and brown). Make each section a different color. Flatten out the coffee filter leaf onto newspaper to keep your table from getting stained.

Use a eyedropper to make designs on the coffee filter using the colors in the ice cube tray. Each color will spread and run into the other colors. This is a lot of fun for the kids (and the grownups) and makes a good lesson for what happens when you mix colors. Let the filters dry completely and then use them for great fall decorations. This craft provided courtesy of Free Kid Crafts.