by Carolyn Joslin

Created on: October 13, 2009

As a mother of two small children, I'm always looking for easy projects to help get my kids ready to celebrate holidays. Here are three especially easy projects that you can do with kids of all ages.

The first project is to make egg-carton spiders. This project requires an egg carton, pipe cleaners, glue, google-eyes, and markers. Cut apart each "egg" section of the egg carton. Cut pipe cleaners in to 2'-3" sections. Get glue, eyes, and markers ready, and call your kids to the table. Turn the egg-carton section upside down, so the dome is pointing up from the table. Glue two eyes onto the carton, and decorate with markers. We usually add spots, stripes, and swirls to decorate our spiders. Insert the pipe cleaners around what is now the bottom edge (the open side), and bend them so that they hold the egg spider's "body" off the table. You now have a cute little spider that you can put anywhere in your house, and they're light enough to tape to a wall or ceiling for added effect! Each carton makes 12 spiders (duh!) and the average cost is less than $5 for the whole project!

The second project is hand print ghosts. Using either a pencil or paint (depending on your confidence level and the age of your kids) and some black construction paper, you can make quick, easy ghost decorations to hang from the ceiling or tape to walls. Cut the construction paper into halves or quarters (depending on the size of your child's hand). Paint the palm of your child's hand with white paint (and glow-in-the-dark looks awesome!) and then have him/her put their hand on the paper with fingers and thumb all together. Turn the picture upside down, and you will see a ghost with a bumpy skirt at the bottom. To do the pencil version, have your child place his/her hand on the paper, again with fingers and thumb all together, and trace around the hand. You can then fill in with paint, decorate, or outline and hang up as it is. This project can be repeated endlessly, and the only cost is your construction paper and paint.

The third project is rock creatures. This one is a little harder, but can also be lots of fun. You will need to prep ahead of time by painting rocks with orange, white, brown, or green paint. You can make this into a 2-day project by taking a walk and having your kids help you find the rocks to paint. You will start with a base coat of paint and allow it to dry thoroughly. Then let your kids turn the rocks into pumpkins, spiders, ghosts, and monsters by adding google-eyes and pipe cleaners or by simply drawing features on the rocks. You can then set the rocks near your front door, on an entryway table, or just about anywhere else. The possibilities are endless, both in finding shapes and sizes of rocks and in the features and decorations you put on them. The only cost is the paint and the eyes / pipe cleaners you add.

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