Angie's Schoolhouse: Fall Celebration

The Fall season is here! This is a favorite season for many people. I enjoy the cool weather and the Fall colors.

When Fall comes around, there are lots of things to celebrate. For many people, Halloween is one of the most anticipated events of the season. My family never went all out for Halloween, but we would decorate and throw occasional Halloween parties. The last several years, we haven't even decorated for Halloween. I do like traditions, though, and this is a great time of the year to hang out with friends and family. Due to Covid, we have to limit our circle of friends to just close family members right now.

With the pandemic and my 8 year old daughter being at home all day every day, I'm trying to find ways to make life a little more fun for her. Honestly, teaching has me very exhausted but I try to find the time and energy to do this for my kids. So I came up with a Fall Celebration instead of a Halloween party.

Many kind people have told me that I am creative and I should dedicate myself to making party decorations, but honestly it's hard, time consuming, and people don't usually want to or can't pay for such an expensive service. I don't particularly like spending so much time making party decorations, I only do it because the smiles and happiness in my kid's faces are worth all the late nights I spend making decorations. I have many other things I could and would rather do than spend them making party decorations.

So I want to share what I'm doing and offer you the templates, so you don't have to start from scratch like I did.

For this Fall Celebration, I began by creating a simple invitation that I was able to text my family so they could save the date. You can use my template by clicking here.

Then, I came up with a list of Fall activities.

I created a Fall Bingo. You can download the Fall Bingo for free from now until Halloween. In November it will become a paid item, so be sure to download it soon.

We will play Bingo and the winners will get to poke a hole in the pumpkin and get a prize! For this Poke-A-Hole Pumpkin, we used 9 oz Solo clear plastic cups, orange PMLAND 20 inches tissue paper, hot glue gun, glue sticks, poster board, and of course candy and/or prizes. I folded the sheet in 8ths, then cut the corners off. I placed it over the cup and wrapped it tightly. I turned it upside down, squeezed hot glue around the edge of the bottom of the cup and glued the paper to the cup. Don't forget to put a prize in each cup before you cover it! Then I made the shape of the pumpkin with the cups on the poster board and glued them. Don't forget to cover 2 of them in green paper to make the stem. If you don't have green tissue paper, you can just make a stem out of green paper, cut it and glue it to the poster board. I think this will be fun! Can't wait for everyone to play Bingo and win so they can poke a hole and get a prize!

Matching Pumpkins or Pumpkin Memory is a visual discrimination game that can be played by anyone. You can download this one for FREE until Halloween as well.

Tic-Tac-Toe is an easy game to play and prepare. All you need is a piece of poster board and some electrical tape or thin duct tape. Kids can play using pumpkins, leaves, acorns, or even candy.

Buy 1-3 large pumpkins with long stems and you now have a Pumpkin Toss game. I bought some glow in the dark necklaces and bracelets so that they can toss them. This is an easy game to prepare and I'm sure kids will be be thrilled playing it.

We will also be doing other activities on that day. We plan on having the kids paint a pumpkin, we will cut a pumpkin in half and take everything out of it, and we will build a scarecrow. I already have the clothes and I've been saving newspapers to stuff it with. If I can't make a small pumpkin to stay on as a head, we will just use a paper sack as a head.

To decorate, I also bought some tissue paper pumpkins from Amazon. I will be placing those on the table and throughout the house.

I also purchased some Fall Clings because that's another easy, clean and low cost activity that kids enjoy and will keep them busy for a short while during our Fall Celebration.

Other decorations include Pumpkin pinatas, Freshly Squeezed Pumpkin Juice, Pumpkin Poo, Pumpkin Teeth, Sweet Pumpkins, "Fang"tastic Donuts, and Pumpkin Seeds. For these, I have labels that I will share with you all. You can just print the signs you want for whatever you are going to have at your party. You can download the signs here.