DIY Skeleton Craft/Treat Inspired by “Skelly’s Halloween”

“Skelly’s Halloween” by Davit Martin and Lori Richmond

Skelly is a skeleton who absolutely loves Halloween.  This year he has decided to go as a ghost, but there is just one problem.  His costume billows him up into the wind and when he falls he is broken apart.  Different animals try to put him together again with no luck until a friendly group of trick-or-treaters stumbles across him and show that they know just where each one of his bones goes.

This book is absolutely darling and so much fun.  My kids really enjoyed the attempts from the different animals to assemble Skelly and Skelly is a skeleton that is just so incredibly likable.  A new favorite in our Halloween collection!

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DIY Skeleton Craft/Treats

My kids were in love with the idea of helping a skeleton come back together so I got to work trying to come up with a “skeleton puzzle” idea for them to have fun with.  In the end I decided that white snack food would do just the trick not only to have fun making skeletons, but eating them too!  It was a big hit and may just become a yearly tradition every October.

Supplies:

• large, white marshmallows
• milk chocolate, mini Kit Kats (The unwrapped ones that come in a bag.)
• white, yogurt dipped pretzels
• black or orange sheet of paper
• edible, food coloring markers (I use these ones.)  (You could alternatively try gel food coloring with a small point paint brush or food coloring applied with a toothpick.)

Process:

• We used the colored paper to define work space and to make the skeletons “stand out”.
• For each skeleton you need one large marshmallow for the skull and you can use the food coloring marker to draw a face on it. Then it’s ready to go!
• For the rest of the skeleton I got out two small bowls for each child and filled one with yogurt covered pretzels and the other with the mini Kit Kats.  Then I invited them to make a skeleton.  I love that there were no set rules and they got to just create.
• If you’d like to prep things a little more to make them a tad easier you can pre-break some of the yogurt pretzel to add more variety to the shapes that the children get to work with.
• We didn’t glue our’s to the paper so that we could experiment with different skeleton shapes and eat our snack afterwards!

Below are snapshots of my skeleton, Miss Three’s Skeleton and Mr Five’s Skeleton.  Aren’t they so cute?!  Also, just how in the story the different animals tried to put Skelly back together like their shape, my son really wanted to try making other animal skeletons.  The bottom right hand corner is his interpretation of Skelly in the snake skeleton form.  Such a fun way to take this activity even further to match the book and explore more with skeletal structures.  He got the biggest kick out of it!

If you give this “Beyond the Book” activity a try I’d love to hear how it goes! Share it on Instagram and tag me! (I’m on Instagram as @book.nerd.mommy) Or even just comment here with your thoughts, it would make my day! Or to save this activity for later pin the image below.