Pumpkin Carving with Your Kids

Pumpkin carving is one of Fall’s fun activities for the whole family, and even the littlest kids can join in with some help from Mom and Dad. These pumpkin projects can be handled with a range of crafty skills. Parents can take on the cutting and scraping and let the youngest ones tackle adding the decorations. Use your best parental judgment about allowing older kids to handle hot glue guns or sharp tacks. No-carve options that require only paint and glitter, but no slicing or dicing tools, are welcomed by thumb-fingered adults. These inspiring designs make for a fun and kid-friendly Halloween.

Glow in the Dark Pumpkin

Use glow in the dark paint to create any wild design to captivate the ghosts and ghouls who show up at your house after dark. Paint stripes of alternating psychedelic colors from top to bottom. Decorate with polka dots or stars. Create your own design.

Frozen Elsa Pumpkin

Ice blue glitter spray paint and adhesive rhinestones express your kid’s love for the move Frozen. Get the tutorial at A Pumpkin & A Princess.

Tangled in a Web Pumpkin

Wrap the pumpkin in twine to resemble a web and insert plastic black spiders or paper spider cutouts. Oooooohhh, scary!

No-Carve Emoji Pumpkins

All that’s needed to line your front porch with a whole family of emoji pumpkins are cute faces cut from craft foam sheets and spray paint.

Find the tutorial at Cutefetti Emoji Pumpkins

Menacing Mummy Pumpkin

Eerie eyes peer out ominously from the wrappings of the mummy’s head. Add cheesecloth and black construction paper to turn an innocent pumpkin into a creature from the mummy’s tomb.

Wrap a pumpkin in cheesecloth to create an ominous-looking mummy’s head. Black construction-paper eyes add to the eerie image.

See the instructions at Menacing Mummy.

Cat Candy Container Pumpkin

Let the adults use a serrated knife to saw open the top. Clean out enough of the pulp so that you can fit a glass bowl inside the pumpkin to hold candy. Next kids create a creepy cat with licorice whiskers and ears and yellow gumdrop eyes.

Witch Candy Container Pumpkin

See above to prep your pumpkin, then the kids take over by adding the witch’s green licorice locks, black licorice lips and eyebrows, jelly beans for teeth, gumdrop eyes and peanut shell nose.