Prepping for Halloween in Quarantine? Try These Halloween Activity Ideas to Keep Halloween Safe--and Fun!

“Is Halloween cancelled?”

That’s probably the question on every kid’s mind right now. It’s just not safe to run around the neighborhood grabbing treats out of shared bowls. So how can you show your kids a good time while keeping everybody safe?

Read on for some fun Halloween activities that will keep your kids excited about the season.

Join a Costume Parade

If your kids love dressing up, why not create or join a costume parade? All the kids can dress up and march (socially distanced) down the street, through a park, or around a parking lot to display costumes. It’ll give kids a way to show off, and also get out of the house!

Halloween Zoom Party

Even if you’re not meeting in person, hop online to show off everybody’s costumes! Friends, coworkers, or grandparents will enjoy seeing your family’s fabulous outfits.

Neighborhood Pumpkin Carving Contest

Invite everyone in the neighborhood to decorate and set out pumpkins for a jack-o-lantern contest. Participants can vote for winners online, or just walk up and down the street to admire everybody’s work.

Decorate Masks

Since the face mask is this year’s new fashion statement, why not make it part of the costume? Try creating a mask that matches your outfit, or decorate a fun Halloween mask to wear on its own.

If you don’t sew, don’t worry. The CDC has instructions for making a quick and easy mask with a piece of cloth and two rubber bands. Let the kids choose fabric and decorate it with fabric pens to make their own Halloween statements.

(Note: A costume mask won’t protect kids from germs, so the CDC recommends making a cloth mask a part of your costume. Don’t let kids wear a costume mask and a fabric mask at the same time, as it can make it hard to breathe.)

Make Creative Costumes From Household Items

Since your kids don’t have to impress anybody, make this the year to get creative. What do you have lying around the house that someone can turn into a really fabulous costume? Scarves, hats, old coats, letter jackets, cast-off skirts, oversized shirts, and bath-towel capes can turn your kid into a superhero, a movie actor, a monster, or something you’ve never imagined.

Mad Scientist Candy Lab

Create a laboratory for destroying candy and learning science lessons. Try candy experiments like throwing Warheads into baking soda water to make it bubble, stretching out taffy like ectoplasm, or creating slime by microwaving gummy worms and letting them cool. You can melt, sink, crush, break, soak, and stir--who knows what the kids will discover!

Choose Your Favorite Treats

If you’re not buying 10-pound bags of candy and handing out pieces to every kid in town, why not let your kids choose this year’s treats? This is the year for gourmet chocolate, sour bombs, exotic fruits, or whatever your family really wants. Buying the candy yourself instead of sending kids around the neighborhood also helps you limit the amount of sugar your kids get for Halloween.

Trick-or-Treat Candy Hunt

If you don’t go out trick-or-treating, make the hunt happen at home instead. Hide candy or prizes in Easter eggs, and add glow sticks to make them glow in the dark!

You can also create a scavenger hunt or a treasure map to get kids searching all around the house.

Old-Fashioned Halloween Treats

Try celebrating Halloween the way your great-grandparents did by making the treats yourselves. Kids can mix and shape Jell-O popcorn balls without having to boil sugar, and pulling taffy will get kids involved and teach them about candy chemistry at the same time.

Keep Halloween Fun

Don’t let the current craziness keep you from enjoying Halloween. If you get creative and plan out some new Halloween activities, you can celebrate Halloween 2020-style and keep the day fun for everyone.

Where's the Butter in This Tricky Popcorn Label?

One of my favorite "candy experiments" is reading labels to Find Hidden Candy and other labeling tricks like this. This Healthy Pop popcorn calls its flavor "Butter & Sea Salt," with no artificial ingredients.

But where's the butter?

Because the second ingredient listed in the nutrition label is actually palm oil.

Apparently it's one of the "natural flavors" allowed under the FDA guidelines. There's so little of it, they don't even list it as an ingredient!

And palm oil, though not listed on the front, isn't an artificial preservative, flavor, color, or dye. So this tricky label isn't lying--it's just not telling the truth.

If you want to see some more misleading labels, check out these examples:

• Cheating "Cheesy Cheetos"
• Yogurt Raisins: A Healthy Airplane Snack?
• Lucky Charms, Sugar, and the General Mills Journey

Incredible Growing Gummies!

Gelatin contains long protein molecules that tangle together to trap water molecules. Because gelatin absorbs so much water, candy containing gelatin acts like a sponge. That’s what makes “The Incredible Growing Gummy Worm” one of our favorite candy experiments.


Soaking gummy candy for two days can make it grow twice as long. As the gelatin molecules form bonds, cross-linking like a jungle gym, they trap water molecules between them.




To turn a gummy worm into a “gummy snake,” fill a flat dish with water and drop in a gummy worm (or several). Set aside a dry gummy worm for later comparison. Check back every few hours to see your gummy worm growing, since it can continue to absorb water for up to two days.

Once your gummy worm has grown to its full length, you can perform tests to see how much it grew.

• Use a ruler to measure the length of the giant gummy worm, then measure the dry gummy worm and compare.
• Weigh it and compare its weight with a dry gummy worm. Be gentle, because a water-engorged gummy worm becomes fragile and splits easily, like Jell-O. Try moving it by tipping most of the water out of the dish, laying down some plastic wrap, and sliding the gummy worm onto the plastic to weigh it. Then weigh a dry gummy worm and subtract it from the weight of the giant gummy worm. The remainder is the weight of all the water that was absorbed.

You can also try this activity with other gummy candies, like gummy bears, fruit snacks, or Life Savers Gummies. Check the ingredient labels to make sure that your experimental gummies do contain gelatin. Gummy candies without gelatin, like Swedish Fish, don’t absorb extra water.

Smart Start cereal versus Froot Loops

What kind of a Smart Start is Kellogg's Smart Start cereal? One with more sugar than Kellogg's Froot Loops!



Froot Loops cereal has "only" 24% sugar, while Smart Start cereal contains a whopping 36%.

Here are the full labels:

Smashing Peeps Candy Experiment

Put candy in a cooler with dry ice, then smash it to smithereens!

When you freeze a marshmallow, the molecules get locked in place and the marshamallow becomes a brittle solid. Smash it, and it breaks into fragments, just like any other piece of ice.







From Candy Experiments 2

Cheating "Cheesy" Cheetos (from PureFoodKids)

Cheetos aren't supposed to be health food. They're just crunchy fun.

But they're made with real cheese--that sounds healthy, right?



Actually, there's more salt than cheese. More citric acid than cheese. There's even more yeast extract than cheese.



There's also more sugar than cheese...what? But the label listed 0 grams of sugar!

In fact, FDA rules state that any ingredient weights be rounded to the nearest whole number. So if a product contains less that 0.5 grams of something, it can be rounded down to 0. Once serving of Cheetos might contain 0.49 grams of sugar--nearly 1/8 of a teaspoon. That's the same as eating a whole Tic Tac. (which also has a tricky ingredient label listing 0 grams of sugar per piece!)

So one serving of Cheetos might have as much sugar as a Tic Tac!

These labels provided by Pure Food Kids. Visit www.purefoodkids.org to learn more

Nostalgia candy from Newsies!

I found some great old fashioned candy on sale at concession at the musical Newsies. Since the show is loosely based on a true story about newspaper boys who went on strike in 1899, the concession stand sells "nostalgia" candy--flavors that parents remember from childhood. I did a few experiments, and also learned some new facts!

Come see amazing high school singers and dancers perform Newsies at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, WA, this Friday and Saturday--and get your own nostalgia experiment candy!




Zotz arrived in the US in 1968 after being invented in Italy. The center fizzes when eaten, because a mix of baking soda and malic acid starts reacting to form bubbles in the presence of water (or saliva).







Cow Tales are produced by Goetze's Candy, which started making chewing gum in 1895. Fun fact about Cow Tales: though they look like most caramels, they contain flour, making them closer in substance to Tootsie Rolls.





Aftershock candy is based on Pop Rocks, which were invented in 1956 by a chemist hoping to trap enough bubbles inside candy to dissolve into carbonated soda. While he couldn't capture enough carbon dioxide to make soda, the trapped bubbles explode and escape nicely when added to water!