The best way to learn is through books! To introduce Mila to Halloween concepts, we’ve been reading a ton of different ones. Lately, Mila’s favorite has been Room on the Broom. We extended her learning by pairing the book with an activity to make handprint art.

Again, it’s another decoration that Mila and I will be able to look at in the future and remember our times when she was little!

All we used for this craft was…

• Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson
• Green paint
• Pipe cleaners
• Yarn
• Ribbon
• Black paper
• Googly eyes
• Canvas
• Permanent maker
• Hot glue

I want to start off by saying, I most definitely helped Mila with this craft. Older kids could probably do this alone. But, I used hot glue, cut out the hat, and made the broom. Everything else she had a hand in making… literally.

First, I painted her hand with green paint. Then let her press it on the canvas to make the witch.

While it was drying, I assembled the broom and hat. For the broom I used this cute gold pipe cleaner for the base. Then I cut up ribbon to make the straw part of the broom. I combined them by making a loop with the pipe cleaner and twisting it off.

The hat was easy to make. All I did was cut out a witches hat on black paper and hot glued leftover pipe cleaner for the base of the hat.

When the green paint was dried, I hot glued down the broom and the eyes.

Next, we made the hair. I took a few pieces of orange yarn and braided it to look like the witch in the book. Mila loved helping cut out the pieces and was very impressed with how much it looked like the original witch. She’s finally impressed by my skills!

After that, we glued down the hat and added facial details and the night sky with a permanent marker.

Mila absolutely insisted on drawing the witch’s nose and the moon.

I absolutely love how this turned out… with all of Mila and I’s crafts. It’s festive and we put a lot of hard work into it. Doing a book pairing activity with her also underlines the importance of reading and teaching her that reading is fun and valuable.

Hopefully she’ll want to continue reading and extending upon those lessons in the future.

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What’s your favorite Halloween book that we need to get next year?