We love finding books that highlight the joy of finding those who love you for being exactly who you are. So we were excited to check out this adorable children’s book about a haunted house who worries that she may be too scary for a family to love. Will she be able to find a family who will love her? We had a lot of fun pairing this book with ghost activities for kids!

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Hardly Haunted by Jessie Sima introduces readers to House. She is a lonely house who wants a family to come and make her into a home. She knows that she is a little creaky, and parts of her make some weird noises, and she starts to worry that she might be haunted. As she tries her best to not be spooky, she finds the perfect family who will love her exactly as she is.

This book is really adorable, and a fun haunted house book for kids that don’t like scary things. The text is full of fun sound effects that kids will love making along with the book, while the illustrations give the run down house the appearance of a face, so kids can see how she is feeling. Little ones will love finding the adorable black cat throughout the illustrations, and the sweet ending of the story.

Haunted House Artwork

To bring this book to life, we decided to create a fun and easy ghost craft! We started with a sheet of black construction paper, permanent markers, a plastic Ziploc bag, some white tissue paper, and glue. We looked through the illustrations to get inspiration for our artwork and decided which parts we wanted to add to our picture.

First, I cut the plastic bag along the seam down one side and across the bottom. Then I opened it like a book.

We used a Crayola Take Note Permanent Marker to draw our ghostly figures in blue on the plastic.

When the ink dried, we used a paintbrush to cover the back of the drawings with white glue. Then we stuck the plastic onto the white construction paper and smoothed the pictures out. (You want to be careful because glue can go through the tissue paper).

While our characters dried, Little Bookworm used the illustration as inspiration to draw images from the book onto a piece of black construction paper. She used a gray permanent marker and white chalk paint to draw furniture and cobwebs. When the tissue paper dried, we carefully cut out the ghostly characters and added them to our haunted house scene. We were going to glue them down, but Little Bookworm was having too much fun acting out the scenes from the book and using them as puppets.

Make Some Noise

Since this book had a lot of sound effects throughout the text, we decided it would be fun to try to recreate them with items around the house. As I read the story out loud, Little Bookworm ran around finding things to make similar noises. This not only got her invested in the story, but it was a fun way to talk about sounds and get her thinking about the kinds of sounds all around her.

We definitely recommend checking out this adorable children’s book about a haunted house! Do you have any favorite haunted house activities that can pair with this one? Share in the comments below!

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