What Sound Does A Skeleton Make?

That's what someone asked my son the other day, when they found out that he was going to be a skeleton for Halloween. The baffled look on his face was priceless. Does it go, "Whhhhooooooo-oooooo!!"? Nope, that's a ghost sound. A skeleton is a bag of bones basically, so he concluded that it must make a rattlesnake noise! Thus, an idea was born. Every skeleton needs a bone rattle, right? Here's how I did it:

I purchased a hollow plastic bone. I looked in the costume section of a party supply store, where the caveman costumes were. They were out of the "jumbo bones" ($5) so I headed off to the thrift store and actually found one for $2! And it was two bones connected. Even better!

Since my son's skeleton costume has green bones, I purchased some acrylic paint from the craft supply store in the same shade of green.

I was going to put some dried beans in the bone, but didn't have any so I used popcorn kernels and put my kid to work.

Then I applied two layers of the green paint and two layers of the glow in the dark paint.

And voila! A seriously noisy bone rattler!