Halloween Rock Garden

Painting with rocks is certainly not new to us as my daughter really enjoys painting with them.  We had alot of fun with our Creating with Rocks and with our Princess Rocks.  Who knew that the rocks my husband and I once used to accent our gardens would one day turn into craft projects with our kids!

This time around we used our rocks to create a Halloween Garden.  We made a candy corn rock and used tape resist art to create a pumpkin and ghost.  If you've been following along then you'll know we've had our fair share of acorns.  Even after our Acorn Cap Jewels and Acorn Sensory Bin we had more to create with and so we added a few acorn pumpkins and acorn ghosts to our 'garden.'

Here's what you'll need to make your own Halloween Garden:
Rocks
Paint
Paint brushes
Tape (if doing tape resist)
Stick (optional for pumpkin rock)
Black permanent marker
Acorns
Black Beans
Container

To do the tape resist art simply take some painters tape and make the face that you want on the rock.

Once that's done, hand the paint brush over to the kids and let them paint away!

Once completely dry carefully peel off the tape.  We only did the tape resist with our pumpkin and ghost.  For the candy corn we simply painted the rock with candy corn colors!  It's not shown here but I also added a stick to act as the stem for our pumpkin rock.

For the acorns we just painted them orange for the pumpkins, white for ghosts and added faces with permanent marker.

After our rocks and acorns were painted I knew I wanted to display them outdoors but since I wasn't going to put any protective coating to keep the rain from washing them clean I had to think of somewhere else.  Since most of our Fall and Halloween decorations are on our front porch we added our Halloween rock garden here too. The porch would also keep the rocks safe from rain, etc.

I didn't want to just lay the rocks flat or prop them up so I thought since this is a 'garden' of rocks why not use black beans to act as the dirt and get a container to put them in.  I purchased an orange bin from The Dollar Store, added the black beans and put everything inside.

This Halloween Garden adds to our Halloween and Fall decorations but what I really like is that once we are finished with the holiday I can re-use the beans for a sensory or other activity and the rocks can be repainted after I let the rains get to them.  As for the orange bin I will keep that for future Halloween decorating or I can use it for future Halloween's to hold the treats for trick or treaters!