Young Women Halloween Party

This week we decided to do a Halloween party for the girls. We combined with the Mia Maids since the Laurels had a stake activity. It was fun! We kept it pretty simple.
We picked up a few pizzas and a couple things of breadsticks. We also had some hot chocolate there too. The girls wanted to make some sugar cookies-but not just any sugar cookies. They HAD to have swig sugar cookies. Swig is a place here in St. George that sells drinks and you can add any flavor shot to it. They also have some trendy cookies too.
I used the COOKIE recipe on THIS website. The only thing I did different was baked them at 375 degrees for 11 minutes. I tried the frosting on that website before, but it was a little too sour creamy for me (even though it's the closest thing to swig). Instead, I used the FROSTING recipe from THIS website. Instead of dying the frosting pink, we did black and yellow.

We also had a word Halloween game the girls played when we first got there. Afterwards, we just hung out, ate pizza and decorated cookies. Towards the end the girls decided to play a game of mafia.

A nice, simple activity :)

Classroom Party Ideas

Here are some printables and ideas if you're in charge of the classroom Halloween party!

To save each printable just right click the image and click save as. Then you can pull the image up and print it.

1. Halloween Bingo- this one is fun and easy. There are ten different cards here along with the call out cards.

 

2. Halloween Unscramble- Just unscramble the words in each of the columns.

3. Roll a Jack-O-Lantern- follow the instructions to have each child complete a pumpkin with their own design!

4. Coloring pages- print these out and let the students color their favorite Halloween picture. 

Just cut each page in half and you will have two coloring pages per sheet.
5. Decorate sugar cookies- my mom was the room mother every year. She would always make sugar cookies and we would decorate them. So fun. You can find here recipe HERE

6. Bring your Wii and play Just Dance. We did this activity in the class I student taught in. The kids LOVED it.

7. Paint pumpkins- A room mother had a family member that had a pumpkin patch. She brought a small pumpkin for everyone and they were able to paint them.

8. Musical Chairs -  do this with some Halloween music. It's so fun and all the kids love it.

9. Create a ghost story. You will need a tape recorder for this activity. The leader of this group (room mom or teacher) will start the story. Just make something up that starts out spooky. Pass the recorder around and have each student make up their own part. Later you could make this into a book for the classroom.

10.  Read a Halloween story. Most kids love to listen to adults read them a story. Find your favorite Halloween book and read with excitement. They will be on their seats trying to find out what happens next. You could pass out treats that went along with the book you chose.

Halloween Unscramble

Need more ideas for you kids' Halloween party? Here is another free printable with the answer key.

To download make sure you right click each image and then save it. That way you don't have the web address printed on the bottom.

if you prefer two per page you can use this one.

Caramel Apple Spice - Starbucks Copycat

This is one of my all time favorite drinks! Perfect to sip on a cold day, or any day really :) I posted awhile back about one I saw on Pinterest. It uses a slow cooker and cloves. I didn't like how the cloves didn't dissolve whatsoever. So here is the new and improved one, and so much easier!

Ingredients:
3 cups apple cider
1/2 cup brown sugar
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
2-3 tablespoons caramel topping
whipped cream

Directions:
Bring the apple cider, brown sugar and cinnamon to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in the caramel topping. Pour into glasses and top with whip cream. You can also add some caramel to the top for some extra flavor :)

*You don't have to use apple cider. Apple juice would be a fine substitute
** If you don't want lit bits of cinnamon in the drink, boil it with a cinnamon stick and then discard.

Vegetable Dip

This dip is another family recipe. I use it any time I need a veggie dip! It's filled with good spices and the usual sour cream and mayo.

Ingredients:
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons bon appetit seasoning
2 teaspoons dill weed

Mix ingredients together and chill until ready to serve.

*Bon appetite seasoning is hard to find. Beau monde seasoning is the same thing. If you can't find either, you can use 1 teaspoon onion salt and 1 teaspoon garlic salt as the difference.

Roll a Jack-O-Lantern Game

When I was in school I got to volunteer and then student teach in some of the different schools. I always liked going to the classroom parties! I really liked Halloween parties. They were always fun.

In one of the classes I was in we played this game and it was so fun! Feel free to print and play at your classroom party!

To print, right click the image and save it. From there you will be able to print it on a full sheet.

Halloween Bingo

I created some Bingo Halloween cards. It might be fun to do at home with your kids. You could also use this in your classroom for a Halloween party. If you're a room mom these would be perfect! There are 10 total bingo cards for you to use.

In order for you to print them, you'll need to right click each picture and then save them. Then you can print them and they will pull up as a full page.

 

and here are the call cards. Just print and cut.
*I realized I was missing one so this is updated. I'm sorry for any problems.

Young Women Activity

This week our YW activity was supposed to be just a class activity. However, the rest of the girls decided they wanted to come too! We are so excited to go and do this activity together! We are kind of keeping it simple this time. Simple is good sometimes anyway :)

We are going to go the corn maze here.

Here in St. George, Staheli Farm has an awesome fall activity area they do every year. I'm sure it's like most of the farms around the country. They do a corn maze, a haunted corn maze, a pumpkin patch, hay rides, train rides, and all that fun stuff.

Just an idea if you're needing one!

Gender Reveal Party

Last week we had a gender reveal party to announce what we were having.....

We just kept it simple. I served HOMEMADE OREOS, PASTA SALAD, and a simple drink.

I had a chalkboard out for people to make guesses on the gender. The best part was we had a bunch of silly string in the color of the gender. My family went outside on our lawn and sprayed the silly string on one another. I was having a pregnancy moment when the silly string was happening and took a video the wrong way on my phone. (that has NEVER happened) I only ended up getting the last part of the silly string.

Anyway, here are just a few things from the party.

IT'S A....

Random Acts of Kindness

I was in charge of the combined young women activity this month. Since the theme of this month is to be more Christ like, we decided to do something that can help us become more Christ like. We followed a theme of Random Acts of Kindness.

The activity:
We divided into groups that split up and went to various parts of our neighborhood/ward. I had a few things ready for the girls to just take to people. Each group grabbed a few things.
The assignments and/or stuff I gave ideas to do were:

• take bubbles to the park and either give them to kids playing or leave them for the bubbles to be found later.
• deliver homemade cookies to different people
• pass out root beer with the saying "we are rooting for you" to any they know that might be competing in something. Or someone that might just need a root beer :)
• Wave and say hi to everyone they see.
• Write chalk messages on the sidewalk
• bring garbage cans up to people's houses (this worked out nice since today was garbage day)
• pick garbage up if they saw it
• write anything to make them happy
• anything they felt inspired to do

The only rules were that every girl had to do at least one thing.
These were some of the handouts I did...

Afterwards we went back to the church. We put our chairs into a circle and had the girls tell me what they did and how it made them feel.  It was really cool to see who they delivered stuff too. Most of it was just to some random strangers. I was so impressed. One girl had the idea to bring bubbles to a house with a bike and knock on the door and run. So many people left chalk messages, a group of girls pulled garbage cans up. The stories were so neat to hear!

Then we played a game with some yarn. I started and threw the yarn to someone. When I threw it to them I had to tell them when thing I admired about them. They wrapped the yarn around their wrist and threw it to someone else and did the same thing. At the end, the whole circle was a big web. Everyone had something nice said about them, and everyone was able to complete a last random act of kindness. I mentioned that even though we are all different we can all have something nice to say to one another. Let's be more Christ like and look for the good in others, not the bad. Our YW president also gave a great message. She said that everyone
is good at something. If we look to the person sitting next to us we can find something they are better at than us. It was fun to see the girls all in a circle and talking nice to one another.

I gave them this handout and then had rice krispie treat balls as snacks.