Children Trick-or-treating In Halloween Costumes Coloring Page

Four children walk along a sidewalk with buckets and bags held out, dressed as a ghost, a witch, a skeleton and a pirate. Houses with lit windows and a couple of pumpkins sit behind them, and everything is drawn in clean uncrowded outline. This is a straightforward page for five to nine year olds and there is real freedom in it, because costumes have no correct colors.

The four costumes work as four separate small projects, which suits a child who loses interest partway through a sheet. Do the ghost first, since it is mostly white and takes seconds, then move to the more involved ones. A useful rule for the group: give each child one bright color that nobody else has, so all four figures stay distinct when the page is finished.

Trick-or-treating in its current form is barely a century old. It turns up in North American newspapers during the 1920s and 1930s, and the phrase itself was printed for what may be the first time in a 1927 Alberta paper describing children demanding treats at back doors.