Halloween evening

24/10/13

I ran this evening as a Halloween themed evening. We told the girls at the end of last week to come in fancy dress and we had loads of different outfits, ranging from princesses to witches and vampires. Some of them had really gone to town with their outfit and had face paint or had died their hair with a shop bought costume and others had clearly tried their best with what they had at home. We've had Halloween evenings in the past and they've not gone as smoothly as we would have liked so I decided to try something a little different. Instead of having them all doing one activity and then the next I decided to have it as a rotation type evening, like our craft evening from a few weeks back. I chose 4 Halloween themed activities and then let the girls move from one to the next whenever they were ready. 

We did apple bobbing, doughnut-on-string eating, Halloween biscuit decorating and face painting. Each leader was assigned an activity which they stayed on all evening and the Young Leaders mingled with the girls. I was in the kitchen, doing the biscuits. We bought a few boxes of Halloween shaped biscuits and used the icing left over from pack holiday. Sadly we only had yellow, blue and black but the girls made use of them the best they could (some of them realised that yellow and blue make green and were mixing them together on their biscuit however this became a little out of control and I had to put a stop to it). Some of the biscuits came out looking really good and others didn't so much! We also had the issue that the scouts in the next hall were having their AGM so we had to be quieter than we normally would and we couldn't have as many girls in the kitchen as we would ordinarily have had so we had to rush them to make sure everyone could have a go. 

The girls seemed to be split down the middle about apple bobbing - some of them thought it was unhygienic and refused to do it and others were so keen we couldn't keep them out of the bucket! We had a separate apple for each girl and the water was changed regularly so it was perfectly hygienic but it was quite funny listening to some of them talking to their friends about how 'disgusting' it was to 'share saliva with someone'!

The face painting started off with mum painting small motifs on the girls' cheeks (we'd emailed all the parents a few days before to check that none of the girls were allergic) and then some of the girls asked if they could do each others' faces. This was going OK and the girls ended up looking quite nice with little bats although several of them commented on how talented mum was to be able to do it so well!

Overall, I think this evening was a success and went a lot better than Halloween evenings have in the past (usually we have a load of girls stood around with nothing to do...) however I think that it could have gone even better if we had had more space in the kitchen so we could have had more girls in there at one time. 

Now for a week off for half term and then back on the 7th of November.