Elementary school Halloween projects

As Halloween creeps ever nearer, I think back on some of the memories of the holiday from my childhood. So, in remembrance, I will think of some of the projects we did in elementary school, as well as some other similar memories.

One of my earliest Halloween memories is getting a bunch of Halloween stuff from our basement. We had some plastic Halloween leaf bags and a plastic decoration you put over doors. I was super excited about them, and I put them on top of me. My aunt Sue and cousins were visiting, and Sue took the plastic off of me because she didn't want me to suffocate. I cried, because I wanted to lie underneath them and I could breathe just fine.

In kindergarten, we were given paper skeletons to cut out and assemble. Some kids colored theirs, but I thought that was dumb, because skeletons are white. I started mine, but then it got lost. Mrs. Christensen gave me the last one she had, where someone had started coloring one of the bones (a vertebra, or maybe the pelvis). It was red and blue, and I thought that was fitting, as they were colors of blood (I had heard about blood sometimes being blue). On Halloween, we made brown pom-pom spiders.

In first grade, we made jack-o-lantern construction paper "lanterns." I thought Dennis Jones's looked funny, so I laughed, and he told the teacher, who made me apologize. We also assembled skeletons on construction paper and gave them clothes--I gave mine a yellow baseball shirt.

In second grade, we put glue on strings and put them on tissue paper to make ghosts. I added a bat to my ghost. Another time, we drew a picture and then painted black/gray over it with watercolors. I drew a ghost with orange eyes. Of course, drawing with white crayon was difficult, but I was glad to see when I painted that I had colored the ghost pretty well. I had this picture until I cleaned things out in 2005.

On October 1, 1997, in third grade, we all got different Halloween art projects, depending on the table we were sitting at. One of the tables got to make haunted houses with math problems. Hillary Ulmer had a fit because she wanted to do one of those. One night during cub scouts at the Brenay house, we made Halloween treats with other treats. I used a Hostess Sno-Ball to make a spider, with licorice as the legs. After we made things, I asked if I could eat a Sno-Ball, and the other scouts seemed to judge me for it. Then we went downstairs and Sister Brenay played Halloween songs from the Picture Book of Songs while we went around in the dark making Halloween noises. We were recording a Halloween tape. My screams were audible on the tape, but my ghost sounds weren't. Mark Millard and Mark Brenay made more violent noises, and Mark Brenay made his mom stop playing and said, "I think I killed the piano teacher." When we played the tape at a monthly scout meeting, Mark Brenay liked rewinding the tape, as it sounded like rats.

In the summer between third and fourth grade, I learned that a primary or scout requirement had an option to make Halloween decorations. Since the Fourth of July was over, I wanted to make Halloween decorations. I made a small black pom-pom spider with only six pipe-cleaner legs. I took orange and black pom-poms and put eyes on them, calling them critters. My mom made a jack-o-lantern thing with plastic canvas in which you can put Hershey's Kisses.

In fourth grade, we were making pumpkins with orange construction paper. We had to use multiple colors to make patterns, and I wondered how others' pumpkins were more orange than mine. We made 3D bats out of one piece of paper. I remember having scouts at my house after I made mine, and Mark Millard and Mark Brenay told me that we would make similar bunnies at Easter. We had Halloween activity books. One of the activities was to write a limerick epitaph; this was mine:
"Here lies Castleberry, Paul,
Who walked down the hall,
 When down came a knife to take away his life
And this is where he happened to fall."
We also had one that required us to think of ingredients for a witches' brew, one from each letter. "X-ray soup" was all I could think of for x. I remember this song from fourth grade:


In fifth grade, we had to tear paper to make pictures. I made a hearse for my picture, but it was ugly.

In sixth grade, Mr. Williams had us make bats again. It became a bit of a fad--lots of us made more bats and other things with the same idea, such as owls and ghosts. Someone made one with a witch-face, which I thought was dumb, as witches aren't shaped like that.

I'm sure there were other things as well, but I can't think of them right now.