This craft, care of Veronika’s latest High Five magazine, hits just the note between cute and spooky for preschoolers celebrating Halloween.

To start, paint empty toilet paper tubes (or paper towel tubes cut in half) any color your child desires. You can stick with a classic Halloween orange-and-black theme, but Veronika chose a sparkly mix of purple and yellow glitter paint!

High Five recommended using black craft foam for the wings, but colored construction paper was a fine substitute. Cut a semi-circle for each wing, then make three tiny semi-circle snips along the bottom to make a ragged bat wing edge.

Finally, cut small triangles for fangs and glue on to the tubes, along with the wings and wiggle eyes.

I loved that our resulting bats had quirky preschooler style, whether eyes that were slightly askew or an extra eye on a bat wing. This meant Veronika truly had ownership of the craft… and made our bats a little extra spooky, too!