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Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Here are some eco-friendly ways you can encourage your Eco kids to go green and celebrate Halloween. Connect with nature in a whole new way by making all-natural and recycled Halloween crafts, costumes and decorations.

Focusing on becoming a "Green" family working to instil eco-friendly Halloween activities into everyday activities. Teach Eco Kids the importance of preserving our resources this Halloween and beyond.

Talk to children and read books about birds, plants, gas-guzzling vehicles, recycling, energy use, and organic farming. Just asking children to switch off the lights and reuse plastic bags, replacing chemical laden sweets for trick and treating with healthy alternatives is not enough - they must understand why we’re doing these things and what impact they have.

Recycle activities even little things - like using a cloth bag or pillow case in place of petroleum pumpkins, or tossing the Halloween pumpkin and eggshells into the compost heap - can help the environment. And if your child develops good habits now, they’ll endure as he grows.

Motivate all your friends to take action now. Organize a neighborhood Halloween beautification program for your community, and you and your friends can take the first shift to set the example.You can also start an email campaign to local, state or federal officials to work toward change in areas like clean-air initiatives and wildlife protection.

Nothing gets people inspired like seeing the real beauty of the earth. Host a Halloween viewing party of a nature program like Planet Earth, and show your party guests what we'll be missing if we don’t start living smarter.

Help Eco kids with arts-and-crafts projects, such as making new paper out of old shredded paper. Making Halloween candles by melting down old bees wax crayons, and reusing paper bags as canvases for artwork and Halloween decorations.

In terms of family activities, plant an eco friendly garden with your children, to celebrate Halloween.

Plant a tree for Halloween. At a nursery, purchase a tree native to your area that will provide habitat for a range of animals. Ask for planting instructions. Plant the tree in your yard or arrange with the park district to plant the tree in a local park.

DIY Halloween Costumes

An old sheet still makes a great ghost.

Use non-toxic face paints.

Go through your families closets or browse local resale shops and flea markets for vintage clothes that could make fun costumes. Or put out a request through your local Freecycle, craigslist or ecobites.com free classifieds for used costumes.

You’re probably not the only person in your neighborhood to have a few costumes from Halloweens past buried in the back of your closet. Hold a pre-Halloween costume swap party.

Hand printed reused , recycled or organic cotton T Shirts.

Need ideas for what message to print on your treats, crafts, treasures, party signs or T'S?

Here are a few suggestions from Green Halloween:
 
Happy Hallogreen!TM

Think outside the candy boxTM

Go Green on Halloween

Putting the GREEN in Halloween

Turning Halloween Green

Healthy + Fun = Happy Everyone

It’s Halloween, just greener

Trick-or-treating green style

Green Halloween logo

I ♥ Earth

DIY Trick or Treat Bags

Have Eco children help choose some heavy fabric and sew into simple rectangular bags with handles. Or, buy some canvas bags at a thrift, craft or environmentally friendly fair-trade shop. Old pillow cases work well for trick and treat bags. Use non-toxic fabric pens to draw pictures on them. Take the bags out with you to trick or treat, and for shopping. Make an extra bag for picking up trick or treat sweet wrappers left behind by less green - munchkins.

Thrift stores are great places for used baskets than you can have fun decorating to hold trick and treat treasures. Children love to keep them as a reminder of a great Halloween night. Make some extra bags and keep some in your car and bike carrier.

Play Hats

To make a hat band, cut a strip of recycled or reuse cardboard from around the home, cut about 2 1/2 inches wide, and long enough to go around the head. Use different colored cardboard for each hat you make.

Measure the strip of cardboard around the Eco childs head. Overlap the 2 ends and glue them together with masking tape to make a circle which fits comfortably.

Spooky Hat : Draw a scull and cross-bones on white cardboard. Give it black eyes and scary teeth. Cut out and stick on to half a circle of black cardboard. Glue the black cardboard on to a black hat band.

Princess Crown: Cut zig-zag shapes from a wider hat band to make a crown. Glue on cotton at bottom and use found treasures from home (Grandma's sewing basket is a great place, with Grandma's permission of course) wool felt cut outs and sparkly beads and sequins all over to look like jewels.

Black Cat Hat: Black cardboard with triangle ears. Use non-toxic face paints to give a pink nose and whiskers.

Mouse: Use brown woool felt or cardboard with round ears for a mouse. Pink cardboard or wool felt with leaf-shaped ears for a pig. Grey with enormous ears for an elephant. Give your Eco kids imagination free wings and let them create their own Halloween play hats.

Masks made out of recycled paper bags. Have lots of found objects from nature - feathers, leaves etc to add.

After everyone is done, stage a Halloween parade.

Put on a Play / Use for Halloween Costumes

Here are some ideas:

Make characters so that each Eco child can play a part.

Use your play hats.

Make a witch's hat from black paper or fabric found from around the home.

Add a big star to a blue hat  band to make a fairy's hat.

Make a wand from a thin roll of newspaper wrapped in used foil or fabric. Add a black star for a wicked wizard or a yellow star for a good fairy.

Try some masks made from old paper plates or cut out old cardboard and attach to cardboard tubes (longer than toilet roll holders are best, or glue a few toilet roll holders together).  Make holes for eyes. Decorate with wool for hair. Add a spooky mouth etc.

Make garlands from crumpled paper, empty thread spools, bright colored buttons and pasta. Thread them all on to thin string.

Now decide where you want your play to be set. It might be a forest, on an organic farm, in a fairy castle, on a desert island or in a snowy country.

Make up a story and act it for an audience. Have Fun!

“Pass The Pumpkin”. Have ecokids sit in a circle and pass small pumpkins or gourds when upbeat music is playing from live instruments. When the music stops the child without a pumpkin is out. Continue until there's one child left. That child may take that pumpkin home. You may want to later give every child a small pumpkin to take home too.

Witch’s Limbo - play limbo with a broom

Charades and Scavenger Hunts can be eco-friendly.

Dunk for apples or try to bite apples hanging from strings.

Decorate trick-or-treasure bags.

Wash pumpkin seeds in water and air-dry the seeds by spreading them out on a screen or paper-towels. Place dried seeds outside for bird feed - they’ll love it! You can also grow your own organic pumpkins in your children’s garden.

Build A Scarecrow Have a variety of old clothes, pillowcases for heads, markers and recycled newspaper.

Make a Mural
Use a long sheet of tree-free or recycled paper and tape it to the floor or wall. Give kids some crayons.

If our earth could talk, what do you think it would tell us?

Make a Talking Earth Puppet

Here's what you need

Used heavy paper plate, or 3 thin ones glued together (or use found cardboard and items from around the home)

White, brown and black construction paper (or use found items from around the home)

Paper towel tube

Large Rubber Band

Blue Yarn

2 paper fasteners (the metal kind like in binders)

Blue paint

Glue, scissors

Paint the bottom of the plate blue and let it dry.

Cut "landforms" from the brown paper and glue them on to make the Earth. Cut eyes from the white and black paper and glue them in place.

Poke the fasteners through the bottom of the plate, far enough apart so that the rubber band will hook over each fastener to form the mouth of the puppet.

Tie a long piece of blue yarn to the bottom of the rubber band. Cut two slits in the top of the paper towel tube and slide the bottom of the Earth puppet into the slits so that you have a holder for the puppet.

Drop the mouth string through the tube so that it hangs out the other end. To move the puppet's mouth pull gently on the end of the yarn.

Let your puppet or Halloween pumpkins tell others how to love and care for our Earth, could change colors and make a talking pumpkin puppet.

Here are some tunes to sing along to:

Litter is Garbage
Tune: The Wheels on the Bus
Litter is garbage that wasn't put away,
Wasn't put away,
Wasn't put away,
Litter is garbage that wasn't put away,
In the garbage can.

I put my garbage in the garbage can,
The garbage can,The garbage can,
I put my garbage in the garbage can,
I'm not a litterbug.

Let Me Help
Tune: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Reduce, recycle and reuse,
Be careful with the things you choose.
Don't leave lights and water on,
Pick up litter when you're done.
Keep the air and water clean, Help our earth stay strong and green!

Litter Free Picnic
Tune: Skip to my Lou
We're not litterbugs, no siree
We're not litterbugs, no siree
We're not litterbugs, no siree
We pick up our trash, you see.

Halloween Decorations

When it comes to decorating your house for Halloween, think reused, recycled or found from mother nature whenever you can.

Go on a spiders web hunt. When you find it dust it with fine corn starch or arrowroot and lift it off onto black cardboard that is pre-glued.

If you don't want young children handling knives, they can decorate pumpkins using least-toxic, water-based or tempera paints.

Hearthsong makes a pumpkin decorating kit that doesn't involve knives, just colorful wooden features children stick into pumpkins to make faces. A parent should still supervise and help make holes with a screwdriver for wood dowel inserts

Free pumpkin carving patterns

Halloween Lighting

Charge up some small outdoor solar lanterns during the day, and place them in real pumpkins or luminaria for a renewable ghostly glow at night.

Care2.com suggests, “For an exceptional flashlight, take blank paper and fit it like a tube around the flashlight's bulbous part, extending 4-5 inches and essentially converting the flashlight into a mini-light saber. Once the paper is fitted correctly, cut out silhouettes of witches, spiders, etc. Glue them on the paper and tape it around the flashlight. When turned on, the patterns will stand out on the glowing beam.”

Remember to use rechargeable batteries rather than disposables during Halloween. Battery acid is toxic, leaching into groundwater and causing serious environmental contamination. Dead batteries should be treated as hazardous waste and disposed of properly. Care2.com

Shakable flashlights are also battery free and fun for Eco kids to use.

Halloween Planning

Take the time in the weeks before to enjoy what nature’s best at in autumn. Take a walk through a forest preserve to soak in the fall colors, pick your own apples or pumpkins from a local organic farmer, go for a hay ride or wander through a corn maze. Visit PickYourOwn.org to find the pumpkin patches closest to you. Pumpkin Patches + More

The use of pesticides on pumpkins varies by climate and region, but among the worst used are the organophosphates malathion, a nervous system toxin and possible human carcinogen, and diazinon, a nervous system toxin. To make your Halloween truly green, search for organically grown or pesticide-free pumpkins in your area.

Visit WWF Going wild with pumpkins

Always bring your own cloth or recycled bags with you when shopping for food, gifts, treats or treasures. If you generally drive to do errands, try to get your shopping done all at once, rather than taking many short outings. You’ll save on gas and money while reducing your contribution to pollution and global warming.

Of course, if you can walk, ride your bike, carpool, or take public transportation, you’ll leave an even smaller eco-footprint behind. Halloween is a great time to start taking small steps to keep the world cleaner and greener.