11 Ways to Host Halloween Fun in Your Own Backyard

The spooking season is upon us and every house on the block is decked out with petrifying pumpkins, scary skeletons and ghoulish gravestones. Time to get in on the fun!

If you’re looking forward to celebrating Halloween, but you don’t want to leave home to seek out haunted houses and corn mazes, we’ve got suggestions for bringing the spirit of spook right to your backyard.

1. Back patio pumpkin carving. The jack-o-lantern is a Halloween classic for a reason: it’s a fun, seasonal, and inexpensive way to decorate. The only problem is the mess after carving, but that’s no problem if you set up a jack-o-lantern workshop on the back patio. Supervise carefully, especially during the carving and lighting steps. Younger children might be better suited to tasks like scooping out pumpkin goo and using a marker to draw the face to be carved.

2. Turn your backyard into a haunted house. You can hang up sheets to partition off the inside of your Springfree Trampoline, or use sheets on the laundry line to divide the backyard into different areas for haunted house activity stations for neighbourhood kids. We have lots of fun ideas below, but don’t forget classics, like having blindfolded people put their hands in brains (wet spaghetti), or eyeballs (a bowl of grapes) or guts (leftover pumpkin goo)!

3. Candy corn ring-toss. Pick up some white and yellow paint, orange pylons and glow-rings from the local dollar store. Get the kids to help paint the pylons’ tips white and the bases yellow to imitate the colour banding on candy corn. Then, when it gets dark, crack open the glow rings and try to toss them over the pylons from across the yard. Put some battery-operated lights under the pylons to increase visibility at night.

4. Decorate the trampoline and backyard for Halloween. Your Springfree Trampoline can become part of your spooky décor as you deck out the yard in decorations sourced from the dollar store or designed DIY. Get the kids involved in putting up the decorations to make sure everyone has input.

1. Bobbing for apples. This is a time-honoured tradition that’s easy to set up and guarantees fun for everyone. Buy a bag of apples from your local market or grocery store, and fill a bucket or tub with water from the hose. See who can use only their mouth to get a floating apple out of the tub. Bonus: the apples make for a healthy snack to balance out all the Halloween candy.

2. Make witch’s brew! Here’s a fun group activity for making a no-mess slime that the little ones can play with afterward. Mix shaving cream, food colouring, white glue, baking soda, and saline solution in a bowl, and you’ll have a fluffy dough-like substance you can knead, smoosh and play with.

3. Ghost stories on the trampoline. Practice your favourite scary story and wait until nightfall to congregate on your Halloween-decorated Springfree Trampoline. Then pass around the flashlight and take turns telling guest stories in in the dark.

1. Make a Halloween tic-tac-toe board. If you have a square-tiled patio, use black and orange chalk to colour a 3x3 grid of squares in a clear area, or set up a grid using yellow Halloween caution tape. Challenge the kids to paint rocks in matching game piece sets of ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, or Frankenstein’s monsters. Add googly eyes for extra spookiness!

2. Costume-crafting party. Pull out the costume trunk and gather up your crafting supplies for a day of designing Halloween costumes on the back patio. Pick a sunny day and get to work snipping, gluing, sewing and modeling your best costume ideas.

3. Pin the spider on the web! Have the kids use a black marker to draw small spiders on construction paper and a giant spiderweb on mural paper. Cut out the spiders and put the spiderweb up on the wall. Take turns getting blindfolded, spun around, and trying to stick the spider on the centre of the web with a pin or tape. Whoever’s closest wins a candy prize!

4. High-flying costume photo shoot on the trampoline. Show off both your new costume and your Halloween decorations by going for a bounce on your decked-out Springfree Trampoline and taking some action shots of bouncing mummies, ghosts, and whatever else you’ve dressed up as. Just remember to have a station to leave any costume pieces that could be a bouncing hazard.