Halloween Craft: Balloon Eyeballs

I'm one of two moms who volunteered to help with Nolan's class Halloween party on Friday, so you can bet I jumped on Pinterest and started looking for cheap and easy ideas for crafts.  The one I loved the most was making balloon balls that look like eyeballs.

I figured this was the right craft for third graders.  Now that I've done the prep work and tested my methods, I see that they will really just be able to finish what I've started.

I am in no way taking credit for this craft idea.  I first saw the idea on Michele Made Me and used some tips from Tip Junkie.  I also added a little bit of my own ideas.

Most tutorials recommend using rice as a filler, and one tutorial I read suggested using flour.  I decided to use a variety of fillers so the finished eyeballs would have different textures. 

Materials:

• Colored balloons (I bought light blue and dark blue since they'll be the irises of the eyes; I couldn't find green or brown)
• White balloons--$0.97 for bag of 12 balloons at Walmart
• Fillers (I used rice, black beans, split peas, and flour)
• Sandwich baggies
• Scissors, measuring cup, black Sharpie, red Sharpie

Since I was trying to do this as cheaply as possible, I dug out the kids' sensory bins:

I used the white rice, black beans, and split peas from the sensory bins as well as flour I already had on hand.

Start by measuring roughly 3/4 cup of filler.

Dump the filler into a sandwich baggie.

Roll up your baggie.  It doesn't need to be pretty or fancy, just closed up.

Cut the necks off of your colored balloons (you can do this ahead of time or as you need them).

Shove the baggie of filler into the balloon.

Keep shoving.

Once you get it all inside the balloon, it will be a little lumpy.

Roll and squish it between your hands to distribute the filler.  This is the part that surprised me the most.  No matter how I rolled or closed the baggies, and no matter how ungracefully I shoved the fillers into the balloons, they all came out pretty round and evenly distributed.

This one looked like a blue pomegranate.  I didn't quite cut enough off of the balloon neck, but it'll be covered by the white balloon during the next step.

I did all of the above steps at home and will leave the remainder of the steps to be completed by the kids at the party.

Here are my balloon balls all ready for the party:

Filled with flour

Filled with rice

Filled with black beans

Filled with split peas

You may have noticed that I had done the next step on a couple of those.

Cut the necks off of your white balloons.  You have to cut off more than just the neck because you want to leave a circular opening.

Stretch the white balloon over a filled colored balloon, making sure you cover the opening of the colored balloon.

Use a black Sharpie marker to color in a pupil, and use a red Sharpie marker to draw in little veins.

Here are balloon balls in succession:

That's it! 

Now I'll see if the kids are able to stretch the white balloons over the balls I made.  I can always help with that part, and then the kids will color in the pupils and veins.

Happy Halloween!

Jessica