How to run a Pumpkin trail
By Naomi Askew
We live in a road that’s close to my kids’ primary school and on our road and the next road there are lots of families who go to the primary school, some of them are good friends of ours and some we just know to say hello to. There are always lots of families with young kids out trick or treating at Halloween at its very friendly and sociable. During Covid, when we couldn’t trick or treat we worked together to create a Halloween trail for the children on our two roads.
I posted a little explanation of my trail idea through the door of all the houses on my road and the next. I included my house number and phone number and asked people to get in touch with me if they wanted to be part of it. A handful of people got in touch to say they loved the idea and wanted to be involved and our friends were on board too.
We tried to provide an easy trail for little ones and slightly harder code version for older primary age kids. For the easy version the kids just had to find letters in the window to spell out a word. We chose SQUIRREL because there’s a family of squirrels that run up and down the gardens between our two roads. For the older kids I used Canva to create a Halloween picture code and the kids had to find the pictures in the windows, match them to the letters in the code and rearrange them to find the word. I tried to use lots of Autumn themed and cute Halloween images rather than scary Halloween pictures. I also found some Halloween jokes online and created an activity sheet for the kids to decipher the punchlines of the jokes using the code. I printed large versions of the letters and code pictures that the kids needed to find and all the households who’d volunteered put them up in their windows. I printed the code and activity sheets as cheap flyers on Vistaprint and ordered enough copies that everyone in our two roads could have one if they wanted one. Everyone who wanted to participate came and collected the activity sheets from a plastic wallet that I’d stuck to our front door and then did the trail. It was really lovely to see families walking up and down the street together and lots of households put bowls of sweets on their doorsteps for the kids to take from.
To be honest I think I made the trail slightly more complicated than it needed to be! And we forgot to remind everyone to leave their lights on to illuminate the picture clues which made some of them hard to see! But it helped us to get to know more of our neighbours and was a lovely community time during the really difficult time of lockdowns.
