Milk Carton Haunted House Bird Feeder

Milk Carton Haunted House Bird Feeder 

Cub Scout Meeting #1

Hello everyone! The first week of October I held my first den meeting as a den mother and we had a blast!

My den is a group of Bear cubs (3rd graders) and we needed to work on our "Achievement 5 Sharing Your World with Wildlife" for earning towards our Bear badge. The achievement 5a states to make a bird feeder. I figured that since its October that it would be fun to make a Haunted House bird feeder. 

Our den meetings are held in the library so it wouldn't be a good idea for the boys to paint the milk cartons themselves so I prepared the cartons by washing them, drying and then painting them with black acrylic paint. I was able to paint 12 cartons with just one small bottle of black acrylic paint. (right...middle picture shows my box ready to go with all the pre-painted milk cartons and snapware containers that held all the small bottles of glue, stickers etc. 

The windows on the milk carton are actually glow-in-the-dark duck tape =D I was so thrilled to find this!!! (its pictured in the upper right in photo) For the dimensional stickers, they were purchased at Michael's craft store for $1.00 a pack. I bought 6 packs (2 ea of bats, spider in web stickers and eyeball stickers) and divided up the stickers among the boys.  To make things run easier at the meeting I didn't want to bother with cutting all the duck tape strips for the shingles on the roof. What I did was cut the strips in approximately 2 inch length and then folded the strip leaving part of the sticky strip exposed and then I adhered them to baggies. The boys then could just peel off the strips and place them on the top of the carton. I make a pre-cut slit at the bottom of the opening on the milk carton so that the boys could just slip their wooden stick (also purchased at Michael's craft store in a pack) right into. This way I didn't have to deal with cutting and messing with it at the meeting. I also cut out the little ghosts and bats you see on wire floating above the feeder. I laminated them and once cut I taped them to pre-cut craft wire so all the boys needed to do is tape the wire to the roof. The last thing I did to prepare the feeders for the meeting was to hole punch the top of the carton and attach the string for the feeder to be hung up. 

Here is a printable I created of how I prepared the milk carton feeders:

Here is a printable of the ghosts (print and laminate)

Here is a printable of the bats (print and laminate)

Trick or Treat sign (print and laminate)