The Best Skeleton Crafts and Activities for Kids

Inside: Fun and unique skeleton crafts and activities your kids will love making.

With Halloween coming up in a few days I figured now was the perfect time to do a little unit study on the human body skeletal system.

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So this past week we have had fun learning about the human skeleton and the bones in our bodies with books, movies and a fun educational activity or two.

Today I wanted to share with you what we did and some other fun skeleton activities that are great for both older kids and younger kids.

Skeleton Books and Movies

A great way to start any unit is with books. I checked out a few books about the human skeleton at the library.

If I was you I would check and see what the library has available and work with those.

The book we liked was A Book About your Skeleton it’s a simple book with some basic facts. Perfect for our short and sweet unit study.

We watched the magic school bus episode 15: Flexes its muscles. The episode is mainly about muscles but also talks about bones as the kids build a robot.

We also watched the youtube video of the song spooky scary skeletons and that was fun.

Skeleton Crafts and Activities for Kids

These skeleton activities for kids are a great addition to any body unit or as a fun Halloween craft. They are also fun to do at home for some quality time with your kids this Halloween.

Life Size Skeleton

The activity I was the most excited about and was such a fun activity was making “life size” skeletons.

Kids of all ages will love making their own bones (as my younger children call their skeletons).

We used brown craft paper to cut out around each kid. Then we used this skeleton bones free printable template from 123homeschool4me.

The printable bones worked really well and she has a helpful step-by-step guide with how she made them. (the website has some other great printables for human anatomy we will probably use later).

If you want to have the kids label the skeleton bones here are free printable skeleton bone labels.

I printed two of the skeletons at 100% for my 7 and 9 year olds. For my 4 year old and 2 year old I printed the template at 85%.

Each of my kids made their own skeleton…you could totally swap out the skull shape for a picture of each child’s own face if you wanted.

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If I was going to do it again I would probably do 80% for my 4 year old and 70%ish for my 2 year old as the skeletons were a little big for their outlines.

The fun skeleton craft turned out so cute and they are the perfect Halloween decorations for spooky season. They would look so fun on a bulletin board, we have them on the wall in our entryway.

Skeleton Treat

I saw this cute idea to make a skeleton treat on DIY Family Time Instagram page so we included it in our bones activities.

The kids had so much fun making this skeleton treat and eating it. It was the perfect snack time for our skeleton day and to get everyone in the Halloween spirit.

Q-tip Skeletons

Another fun skeleton activity we did was making a skeleton out of Q-Tips and white paint.

The kids looked at a picture of a skeleton and created their own cutting Q-tips as needed on some black construction paper.

This is a great fine motor skills activity and a fun way for kids to do themed crafts with stuff you probably already have on hand.

Skeleton Handprints

The last skeleton craft project we did this year was making skeleton handprints. We simply used black paper and white paint to make handprints all over the page.

Children of all ages will love making handprints for the Halloween season.

I love the look of the little hands! My plan is to laminate the handprints and make them into magnets we can decorate with each year.

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