I love the month of October, because Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I look forward to telling scary stories all year, but I usually start with non-scary stories and work up to scarier ones as Halloween approaches.
I invited Gavin, the older brother of home schooled kids who attend my family storytime, to assist with puppeteering. He is a natural! I brought quite a large collection of my own hats, and borrowed two especially cool ones from the Sno-Isle Libraries’ children’s services collection. As I sat in front of the puppet theater and read Halloween Hats, by Elizabeth Winthrop and illustrated by Sue Truesdell, Gavin wafted a panoply of hats above the theater. 
Afterwards, when everyone throws their hats in the air, the hats began sailing out into the audience.
Then I taught everyone the song, “Did You Ever See a Lassie.” When everyone had learned the words and the movements, I suggested that we could make up our own words to turn it into a Halloween song. The kids loved seeing a little bat, a pumpkin, a mummy, a scarecrow, a skeleton, and a ghostie “go this way and that way,” with Gavin’s able assistance.
Then it was time for me to tell the story of Milo’s Hat Trick, by Jon Agee. I had a very cool purple and black Mad Hatter’s hat to use for Milo’s top hat, and I had created a paper bag bear who could dive in and disappear inside the hat.
This is a very funny story, and I made a perfectly inept Milo. I had stuffed a string of colored scarves inside my clothes, which I had intended to produce with a flourish to the astonishment of my audience, but they began straggling out before I was ready, which was perfectly in character.
Afterwards, everyone made their own Bear paper bag puppet, and then of course they had to test their bears’ ability to disappear into a hat!
