The Green Familia » children’s activity parties

Children’s Activity Parties: Ice

erica — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:06:12 +0000

A cold weather related party is perfect for the winter season. You might want to consider asking your guests to dress in white or blue in honour of the party theme or come wearing scarves and hats. I’d suggest having some ice themed food for your guests. You can make cucumber and apple icicles by peeling the cucumber and cutting it into icicle shaped slices. Sprinkle a little lemon juice on the apple so that your icicles don’t turn brown. Ice lollies can be fun too. I’d suggest carrying on with a blue and white theme and make white (and blue with a little food colouring) homemade lollies with a white yoghurt like vanilla. After all that cold stuff it would be worth having something more warming like hot chocolate on offer, or if it’s around meal times provide soup or stew served with bread.

A lovely art activity is to make icicle pictures. You’ll need (eye) droppers, diluted paint of various colours and tin foil. You’ll need to rig things up so that the foil is held vertically to allow the diluted paint to run down it. Squirt out the diluted paint at the top of the sheet and let it run down to create your icicles. Once dry you can cut out the icicles and place them on backing paper. It’s fun to turn the lights out,the torches on and shine them on the icicles to see what effects you get.

The other activities will need some preparation a day or two (or longer) in advance. For the first, make up various coloured waters using different food colourings. Then put a layer of your first colour into a container. Freeze on a flat surface in the freezer, then add a layer of another colour and so on. Once complete your creation can be turned out onto an old towel for inspection or placed in a large tub of water to watch as it melts (it would be great to use a clear container for this- I used a see through storage box). Another fun idea is to freeze water in different shapes and sizes of container.

If you’re interested in more ideas for seasonal children’s activity parties, try our Valentine’s Day party or Mardi Gras party.

Children’s Activity Parties: Halloween

erica — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:52:32 +0000

A really important part of any Halloween party is dressing up and there are always lots of costumes to choose from in the shops. There’s quite a range of themes: pumpkins, vampires, witches, etc. So when you invite people make sure they know that it’s fancy dress.

I love the traditional games like apple bobbing. I’d recommend small apples for these as they’re easier for little mouths. You don’t need masses of water and a washing up bowl will do the job. An alternative is to do without the water and suspend the apples on strings. You can do the mummy wrap too. This is usually done with rolls of toilet paper to cover the child with ‘bandages’, but I’d suggest using newspaper instead for a more eco friendly version of the game.

There are any number of arty activities you can try and what you decide to do may depend on the time available and the age of the children concerned. The most obvious suggestion is pumpkin carving which is lots of fun, but can be time consuming, a bit tricky and it’s certainly a challenge if you don’t want to waste all that pumpkin flesh. It can be nice to do the same thing with squashes rather than pumpkins as they are smaller (and I think more tasty to eat). Bat shapes are quite easy to cut out decorate and you can do this with black card or paper or better still make some biscuits. If you make biscuits make sure you have the right colours of food colouring to make icings (red, green, white and black would be my picks).

For refreshments you can obviously use your bat biscuits and apples from your activities. If you have some suitably shaped cutters you could make sandwiches in the shape of pumpkins or bats. I’d recommend using some normal foods and giving them spooky or ghoulish names or making them in a different shape: carrot fingers, cheesy eye balls or snake pizzas.

If you’re looking for more seasonal party ideas, how about an autumn party.

Children’s Activity Parties: Hedgerow Hunt

erica — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:00:57 +0000

For this party you’ll probably need to use a park or local woods, but if you have a big productive garden that might work too.

The first activity is a treasure hunt for autumnal natural items. What you look for will depend on your venue (so have a look round in advance so that you aren’t asking the impossible), but I’ve got a few suggestions for you here. Ask the children to find different types of nut like acorns, beech mast, conkers and chestnuts. Seeds from trees are another good one, try sycamore, ash and lime trees. Berries too, but this will be one for older children or if you have lots of adults as there are dangers in eating the wrong type of berries. Leaves from the various trees are good and challenge the children to find ones in different autumn hues. If you’re in the garden with fruit trees, you could get your guests to find apples of various colours. It would be helpful to have some identification guides on hand, unless you’re an expert. Borrow them from the library, if you don’t have any at home.

Collect a range of natural objects and take them home for some painterly fun. Make a collage with colourful leaves, cones, nuts and seeds. Have plenty of glue and some brightly coloured paint on hand to create a wonderful autumn array. You could create a picture of a hedgerow and encourage the children to include some of the animals that will make it their home.

For refreshments, try to match the foods to the activity. A berry pie would be lovely, but blackberry jam on toast is simple and will go down very well too. You could even pick some blackberries while you’re out on your treasure hunt to add to a pudding. If you have a good supply of local chestnuts you could try roasting them, but not all children will like the taste. Some toasted seeds or bread with seeds on top would be nice too. Drinks could be on the berry theme too and if it’s a cold day consider warming up the blackcurrant squash a little.

If you’re looking for other party ideas this month, then how about a Harvest party.

Children’s Activity Parties: Highland Games

erica — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 11:00:20 +0000

Highland Games are a traditional summer activity in Scotland and it can easily be adapted for children to enjoy. This party is one that you need a bit of room for, so it’s probably one for bigger gardens or the local park.

Tossing the caber is the archetypal Highland Games event and it’s fairly easily scaled down. You just need to find a suitable big stick or small branch. Take care to choose one with a flat edge for holding (or cut it to suit) and watch out for splinters, etc. It might be worth making sure your party guests have an idea of what expected of them and You Tube can help there. Make sure no one is in the way before you start.

Welly wanging is easy and fun to try. It’s very easy to adapt it to suit your guests as smaller children can throw smaller boots. Mark the starting line with tape, string or ribbon and give everyone 3 chances to throw with the longest winning. It would be useful to have some sort of way of marking each individuals longest throw and this could be as simple as pieces of paper with names on secured with stones. You could try a handicap contest where the adults have to throw from a line further back or maybe with their left hands (unless they’re left handed anyway).

A tug of war is always fun and everyone can take part. Tie a piece of cloth in the middle of your rope and mark the winning lines for each side. When the cloth goes over the line, the team pulling that way have won. You can play this game multiple times with different team makeups.

Take a picnic to keep your athletes happy. You could choose some Scottish treats if you like, maybe smoked salmon sandwiches and shortcake biscuits washed down with some Irn-Bru.

If you’re looking for more summer party ideas, how about a summer garden party?

Children’s Activity Parties: Valentine’s Day

erica — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:00:07 +0000

Get your Valentine’s day party started with a fun art activity. Cut out some heart shapes pink and/or red card – it doesn’t matter what size they are and they don’t need to be exactly the same. Use a hole punch to cut a single hole just below the dip of the heart. Get each child to decorate some heart shapes with whatever comes to hand: we used glitter, stick on jewels as well as crayons/felt tips. Once they are finished, thread the hearts together with ribbon or string to make a lovely decoration.

I’d suggest making heartshaped biscuits to eat and using them as your next activity. You can either get the children to make the biscuits or decorate them or both. Take 150g of plain flour(take out a tablespoonful and replace with a tablespoonful of cocoa), half a pinch of salt and half a teaspoon of baking powder, mix and rub in 50g of softened, diced butter. If I’m making this in advance, I do all the mixing in the food processor, but you can do it by hand and it may be more fun that way. Stir in 50g soft brown sugar, a beaten egg and spoonful of golden syrup and mix well. You can double up the recipe if you want to make more or there are a lot of children – this amount makes about 30, but it depends on the size of your cutters.

Using plenty of flour on your rolling surfaces and pin, roll out the biscuit dough, then use heart shaped cutters to cut out your biscuits. Place on a greased baking sheet and cook for about 12-15 minutes at 160 degrees centigrade. They won’t take long to cool and then you can decorate with coloured icing and sprinkles of various kinds.

For drinks, I’d go for pink lemonade. The easier way to make this is to use shop bought lemonade and add a little cranberry juice or red grape juice until you get your desired colour. Test it for sweetness too as cranberry juice can taste quite sharp. Making homemade lemonade is quite easy too and you can just add your coloured fruit juice as before.

If you are looking for seasonal party ideas or activities, you might be interest in a Pancake Day party (Shrove Tuesday for 2011 is 8th March) and St.David’s Day is 1st March.

Children’s Activity Parties: Winter

erica — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:00:44 +0000

The early part of the New Year can seem a little dull and a winter party is the ideal way to liven things up. If it’s snowy, you can send the children out into the garden to make snowmen or have a snowball fight, but if it’s grey and damp or bright and frosty, then you’ll need a little more inspiration.

If you’re staying inside, make some winter scene pictures. You could either make one big one or a smaller one for each child. For ours, I used 2 sheets of white A4 paper and 2 sheets of pale blue to create the snow covered ground and the sky. Once sellotaped together at the back, you have your canvas ready. I cut out some bare tree shapes out of brown card, yellow discs for the sun and different sizes of white circles for our snowman. Older children can help with the cutting out. Provide a range of materials for the children to use (whatever is to hand that seems suitable). I had the following items available: house and car shaped post-it notes; white tissue paper to cover things with snow; coloured dot stickers for snowman buttons; googly eyes; white pompoms; and snowflake shapes cut out from christmas wrapping paper. The children will need glue, pencils, crayons, etc. too.

For refreshments, serve up warming food and drink. Ginger flavoured biscuits and cakes seem the best thing for cold winter days and I love making and eating oatmeal parkin. A favourite winter drink, and cold remedy, for me is rosehip tea with orange juice. To make this make a strongish batch of the tea, in the teapot, and pour out into individual mugs to about three quarters full. Top up with orange juice – I like this best with freshly squeezed orange juice, but it tastes good from concentrate too. If you don’t have rosehip tea and orange juice to hand, try another combination with another fruit tea and juice. I like lemon and ginger with apple juice too, but lemon and ginger tea isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Time your party so that the finale can take place as it’s getting dark. Snapdragon is an old parlour game that involved setting fire to brandy soaked raisins and putting your hand into the flames to get out the fruit. My safer version of the game will keep children away from the flames: Soak some raisins in advance in some grape juice and a sprinkle of cinnamon (if you want to have some adult ones too, you can use brandy). Put the raisins in some small bowls and place them and some tealights on a tray. Light the tealights and carry into a darkened room; chant the traditional rhyme if you like; get the children to blow out the candles and then eat the raisins.

If you’re looking for more winter children’s party ideas, then consider having a Burns Night celebration.

Children’s Activity Parties: Christmas

erica — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 14:19:59 +0000

A children’s Christmas party can be great fun at this time of year and is a good way of filling the gap between schools finishing and Christmas proper starting.

Christmas card making is always popular and with a little preparation you can make some really nice cards. I always keep cards from last year to cut up to make homemade cards the next year, but failing that you can use a Christmas catalogue or magazine to get some nice pictures to cut out and stick. Cut out some shapes in card to stick onto your cards : Christmas trees and baubles are easy to do even if you’re not great with your hands. Provide some glittery bits, glue and card and you’re away.

Another favourite activity is to make mince pies. You’ll need some shortcrust pastry – I usually buy mine readymade; some mincemeat, beaten egg, a little plain flour, cutters and a bun tin. Grease your tin in advance and ask your guests to bring aprons and rolling pins.

Get the children to roll out the pastry on a floured board or table and cut out shapes. I used large round cutters for the bottom, but we went to town a little on the tops and cut out a variety of shapes from whatever cutters were to hand. Just spoon a teaspoon of mincemeat into the bottom and top with your chosen shape. I make homemade mincemeat because it tastes divine and always use Delia’s recipe, which I’ve seen recommended by other chefs. Brush the tops with a little beaten egg to add a nice colour and cook for about 15-20 minutes at 200 degrees centigrade.

For refreshments, mulled wine is an obvious choice and really warms you up on a cold day. If your guests are driving or you’d like the children to have some too, then substitute red grape juice for the wine. You can either buy sachets of spices to add or it’s really simple to make your own. Again, I follow Delia’s recipe because it’s easy and I have her Christmas book. Obviously, you can serve up the mince pies when they are cooked. You can also consider other Christmas treats: lebkuchen, stollen, panettone, etc.

Children’s Activity Parties: Autumn

erica — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:00:57 +0000

Much as I hate to feel the temperature cooling and the days shortening, I also love the colours, smells and crispness of autumn. It’s a magical time for children too and they’ll enjoy exploring the season with these activities.

For this autumn party, I’d suggest serving autumnal foods – nuts ,seeds and berries are what comes to mind, so how about fruit cake, toasted pumpkin seeds and ginger nut biscuits (a bit of a cheat I know!) to eat and fruit juice to drink.

A tree picture is great fun to make and involves lots of different creative activities. First collect some leaves – I’d recommend doing this on a dry day, but that’s not essential. It would be great to get the children to choose their own leaves, so it would be ideal if you can go somewhere that has a range of different trees. Take some plain white paper and brown wax crayons to take bark rubbings from the trees.

Back in the warm, cut off a length of lining paper (this is cheaper than buying a paper roll from an art shop or similar) and create your tree trunk by gluing on your bark rubbings in the shape of a trunk. Then paint the leaves and use them like sponges to make leaf shapes all over the top of your picture to create a leaf canopy and include a few further down to show that they’re falling or have fallen to the ground. We used bright red, yellow and orange paint (don’t forget you can mix your own orange from red and yellow). If time and energy permit, you could make some potato cut apples to dot around too.

Make a scarecrow for your vegetable patch by lashing together with string a couple of canes or straight, sturdy sticks (I used prunings from a shrub). I had a vertical and 2 horizontals to which to attach the top and trousers. Use old clothes to dress your scarecrow. I used outgrown and worn out children’s clothes to make a small scarecrow as our garden is small, but feel free to use adult clothes for a larger version. You can make a head in a variety of ways, but stuffing a pop sock with leaves is one of the easiest. You can also stuff the rest of the body with leaves or straw, using string or elastic bands to seal the ends. Stuffed old socks make great feet or hands and of course, no scarecrow is complete without a hat.

After all that activity, relax with a few books. There are loads of books to choose from, but here are a few personal autumnal favourites:

Henny Penny – a children’s classic.

Ouch! – a fun book with great illustrations.

Tractor Ted in Autumntime – available in both book and DVD formats, both are very informative.

Children’s Activity Parties: Harvest

erica — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:00:07 +0000

At this time of year it’s great to spend a little time reflecting on where our food comes from and enjoying the variety of good things available to us. Children get very excited about helping cook or understanding where their foods come from. I’ve collected together a few activities to form the basis of a harvest party.

Breadmaking is a really fun thing to do and even fussy children will love to eat the results. We made bread rolls, but older children might like to do something more involved, perhaps a plaited bread. For the bread rolls, mix some egg and milk together, making up 300ml of milk/egg mixture. This is a good recipe for using up egg yolks if you’ve been making meringues or something else using lots of egg whites. The more egg you add the richer the bread, but one egg is fine. Into this mix a teaspoon of yeast, 500g of bread flour (I used white), 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar and 40g of diced butter. I used the dough cycle on the bread maker and timed it so that the bread was ready to make into rolls when my guests arrived. You could either make the dough in advance like that or make it together and do something else whilst it’s rising. If you make it by hand allow 30-45 minutes for it to rise after kneading it.

Once your dough (whether you made it by hand or in a machine) is ready knock it back by putting it onto a floured surface and kneading it. It can then be cut into 24 pieces which can be rolled into fat little fingers. Put these onto a greased baking tray, keeping plenty of space between them as they will need to rise again. Then cover with cling film that you have brushed with oil and leave to rise again for about 15 minutes. Brush the tops with beaten egg and put into a preheated 220°C or gas mark 7. Cook for 12-15 minutes. Cool for a few minutes on a rack and then serve up to your hungry helpers. Any leftovers make a lovely continental breakfast for the next day.

Whilst the bread is rising or cooking, why not read a book or two together. My choice of story book would be Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper. In fact, this is one of a series of 3 and I would be tempted to read the lot, if the children’s attention lasts, as they are lovely stories. A more factual choice would be Harvest (we love festivals) by Honor Head which is packed full of pictures and information.

Buy a selection of different types of apples (and maybe pears as well) and encourage the children to try them. They can compare and contrast the different types and you could even get them to try a little raw cooking apple to see how sour they are, before you cook and sweeten them.

If you can find an event locally, it would be great to follow this party up with a visit to an apple festival or something similar. I fancy trying the Erddig apple festival this year and we usually go to the apple display at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, where you can see more than 150 different types of apple.

Children’s Activity Parties: Garden Party

erica — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:00:38 +0000

My best summer memories of childhood (and beyond) are of days spent outdoors enjoying great weather. For this themed activity party get outside, if at all possible, either in the garden or in a park. If the weather does turn against you, you could use picnic blankets and pop up tents in the living room to bring a bit of the outdoors inside with you.

Try combining eating and art activities by making and then eating a person or animal out of fruit and vegetables. I’d suggest that you provide a range of items both whole and cut or sliced up. Grapes are good whole, carrots and cucumber can be sliced lengthways and strawberries or banana can be cut horizontally. That will give the children a range of shapes, colours and textures to work with and will contribute to their 5 a day too.

Outdoor games are great ways to burn off some energy, but you’ll need to adapt your game to suit your participants and your numbers. Young children love hide and seek more than anything and it can be played almost anywhere: garden, park or even indoors. Older children might prefer to play something more structured like badminton or rounders. Just playing catch with a frisbee or kicking a ball around can be great fun too.

Making flowers is fun activity and the children can take them home with them afterwards. You’ll need some straightish sticks (harvest these from your garden if you can); different colours of tissue paper; and of course scissors and sticky tape. Optional extras could include green paint for the sticks (or florist’s tape) and pipe cleaners for the centre of flowers. For younger children, you can make a simple flower by folding a rectangular piece of tissue paper in half and cutting into it from the folded side inwards. Don’t cut the whole way through. Wrap your tissue paper repeatedly round your stick and fix it in place with sellotape. Older children could cut out individual layers of petals from tissue paper and poke their stick through the centre. Twisting a pipe cleaner around the stick will provide a centre for the flower and disguise the end of the stick.