Playdough is always fun, but even more so if you connect it to the season or a holiday for your kids. Today, we specifically decided to have Halloween playdough fun.

First I pulled out only orange and green playdough, and showed Veronika how to roll little balls of the orange into pumpkins.

Green made cute stems! We then used craft sticks as our “carving knives” to make features in the pumpkins. Veronika thought this was great fun, even though she was mostly just mashing at them while I carved more deliberate triangles and toothy smiles.

We could also roll out long ropes of green playdough to be the pumpkin patch vines.

Next, I pulled out a few Halloween-themed cookie cutters. Now we could make flatter versions of pumpkins and ghosts.

Soon we had little ghosts flying through the air.

Big brother Travis wanted in on the action!

He came over to make lots of pumpkin and ghost shapes, and then used the craft sticks to carve into them.

Pretty soon, the kids were just having wild playdough fun. They were so busy with this step in our countdown to Halloween that I could declare it a mission accomplished.