It's all about the chocolate ...

We decided on a chocolate theme for Sophie's 8th birthday party this year. Originally I was thinking that the party guests could make lots of chocolate goodies (such as chocolate pizza and chocolate rice krispie cakes) but when Sophie came up with a guest list of 20 children I knew that this wasn't going to be feasible, so Plan B was created.

Plan B swiftly took shape with some help from Pinterest (where else would you go?) and I came up with games involving huge amounts of chocolate to fill the two hour party. As always, I did the planning and pulling the activities together and Mr Snowballs did the amazing job of keeping 18 children entertained and stuffed with chocolate goodies on the day.

I couldn't find any invitations I liked that included chocolate so I came up with a simple one made from chocolate jazzies stuck onto rice paper with a bit of melted chocolate, and the rice paper stuck onto the invitation with the party information printed on the back (the rice paper stopped the oil from the chocolate "glue" seeping through and spoiling the back of the invitation). Sophie drew the ribbons and bow for each balloon. Feedback was that many of the parents didn't get to see the "balloons" as they were consumed pretty swiftly. And a word of advice to anyone thinking to copy this, make sure the pens and glue glueing the rice paper onto the invitation are non-toxic as the rice paper was also peeled off and eaten by quite a few of the children!!

As I mentioned above, the party was full of games that involved chocolate in lots of ways: including chocolate anagrams to start, guess the chocolate bar (you could tell the chocoholics straight away in this game as they were the only ones to get almost all the answers correct!) ...

 ... pass the chocolate orange without using your hands ...

 ... chocolate dress up (where you roll a dice and when you get a six you have to put a coat and gloves and scarf on and cut off squares of chocolate using a knife and fork!) ...

 ... moving smarties from one plate to another using suction power through a straw (they were surprisingly good at this) ...

 ... and my favourite, chocolate kisses, where you place a square of chocolate on the party guests lips while they are lying down and the last person to eat the chocolate wins. A lot harder than it sounds as the chocolate starts melting.

 Mr Snowballs made it harder by adding slices of chocolate orange along the way!

After each game, the winning children (everyone was a winner according to Mr Snowballs) got to visit the Chocolate Shop for a small chocolate prize. By the time it came to sitting and eating the birthday tea, lots of the children were suffering from chocolate overload. Some judicious eating of cool carrot sticks and they were ready to tackle the chocolate fountain, which they had all been waiting patiently for since they spotted it at the start of the party!

Chocolate overload or not, the children had a great time and the party girl enjoyed it more than all the rest. And Mummy enjoyed the mountain of chocolates left over for the next week!!

I am just launching a series of Host Your Own Party guides. These are aimed for those of you who want to host a great party for your child but don’t know where to start? The Host Your Own Chocolate Party pack gives you all the information you need to organise and run a chocolate-tastic party and all for only £4. Send me a mail for more information or if you would like to buy the guide.

 

© 2014 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

Explore, rescue, protect! An Octonauts party ...

Justin was five a few weeks ago and he wanted an Octonauts party.

I managed to get the invitations out before Christmas: I found a cute picture of the front of an Octonauts book and fiddled a little to come up with something I was happy with.

I was very late in organising the actual party (for me) and only sat down and planned the games the day before the party, although I had sourced the party bag goodies and party plates before Christmas (as I learnt to do after his very first birthday when I left it until after Christmas and snow meant the things didn't arrive in time!) 

Justin had 10 friends and the party was held at our local community centre (where we've held previous parties). I bought a blue net and some inflatable fish to decorate the room and we made some jelly fish out of plastic food cartons and plastic carrier bags.

We started the party with an Octonauts Creature Hunt. I was "forced" to play some of the Octonauts games on the BBC website to win some creature cards, which I saved and printed out. These were then hidden around the room  and each child was given a creature chart at the start of the games. Once they spotted the creature they then went to Sophie and her friends (the helpful big girls) to get the creature stamped off with a froggy stamp (the closest stamped we had to a sea creature!).

Next game was Fish Egg and Spoon Race. We have a great set of egg and spoons from Early Learning Centre and the children had fun running up and down the hall trying not to drop the eggs!

After that the children played Ball Pool Creature Rescue. I filled a giant bucket with ball pool balls and dropped in selection of sea creature bath toys. The children then had to reach into the bucket and pull out one of the sea creatures (without looking).

The next game was Musical Islands. We laid out large pieces of paper (the packaging saved from a recent Amazon delivery!) - one for each child. The children danced around the islands until the music stopped - they then had to stand on an island. An island was removed after each round and the child not on an island was out of the game. The last one on an island won.

This was followed with Calico Jack’s Treasure Hunt. I have been saving the plastic eggs from Kinder eggs for a very long time and I put a haribo sweet into each egg and hid them around the hall. There were enough for each child to find three eggs and two of these were large ones with a mini-packet of Haribos in.

The final game before the food was served was Octonauts in the Sea (this was a variation of fishes in the sea). The proper game works like this: set up a circle of chairs facing outwards and each child sits on a seat and is named either Captain Barnacles, Kwazi or Peso. A caller calls out one of the names and the children with that name get up and walk around the outside of the circle. The caller then calls different things:
- the sea is getting rough = the children start running
- tide turn = the children change direction
- shark coming = the children run back to their chair.
The last child to return to their chair is out and turns the chair facing inwards; they can play a version in the middle of the circle for fun.

In reality this proved a bit too tricky for 4/5 year olds and Mr Snowballs just got them all up at the same time and got them to run or change direction or return to their seats as per the game rules. They all had lots of fun.

I also set up a table with some Octonauts colouring as a quiet activity for those children who didn't want to take part in every game.

The party bags were just simple paper bags with a label for each child in the Octonauts logo. I found a font that is similar to the Octonauts font and used this (see here). They each got an inflatable fish, a magic fortune teller fish (remember those from your childhood?), an Octonauts colouring book (I saved the images from the BBC website and then printed them four to a page and stapled them into a booklet), and some sweeties.

Mr Snowballs excelled himself this year with running the games and all the children had a fantastic time - even the shy ones were joining in by the end of the party. And with all the help I got from my family (who are amazing) the party was a real pleasure to organise and run.

Next up, the cake ...

© 2014 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

French skipping

Do any of you remember doing French skipping when you were young? Something reminded me of it a while ago and I want to introduce it to Sophie now that the weather is getting better.

I always remember collecting lots of elastic bands to make a decent size loop. My sister is six and a half years older than me so we really didn't play much together as I was growing up, so French skipping was a great game for me to play on my own - I would just attach the ends of the elastic loop around the open gates at home and have fun trying to perfect the "routine".

I can't remember it all now but a little research brought up some suggestions that seem familiar ...

How to play

Find two friends, or one friend and an inanimate object. One person jumps, the others have the elastic round their legs. Three levels of difficulty - low (ankle), medium (mid-calf) and high (knee).

Rhymes

‘Chocolate cake, when you bake, How many minutes will you take? One, two, three, four.’

On ONE: jump up and land with left foot outside the elastic loop and your right foot inside.
On TWO: jump up and land with both feet together inside the elastic loop.

On THREE: jump up and land with both feet outside the elastic loop.
On Four: jump up and land sideways to the elastic, with your left foot on top of the back elastic and your right foot ahead (in front) of the front elastic.

If the current player doesn't manage to do the correct jump their turn is over and play passes to one of the people inside the circle of elastic, who then tries to outdo the previous player.

Here are more of the rhymes:

‘England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales Inside, outside, inside, on!’

You have to jump in a sequence. The first one is seven times, the second one is six times and so on.

• Sevens - facing one end, with one foot inside the elastic and one outside, you jump sideways so that the other foot is inside, then back again (seven jumps in total). If you touch the elastic, you are out.
• Sixes - facing one end, with one foot either side of the elastic (i.e. straddling the elastic). Jump and land with both feet inside the elastic. Six jumps in total (three in, three out). If you touch the elastic you are out.
• Fives - facing sideways, stand on one side of the elastic with your feet together. Jump forwards onto the other side of the elastic. Then jump backwards to the original side. Five jumps in total. If you don't end each jump with both feet firmly on the piece of elastic you are out.
• Fours - facing sideways, one foot under the elastic and one standing on top of the elastic. Jump to the other side, landing with one foot under the elastic and one on top.
• Three and Two are lost in time although I'm sure you can make them up as you go along!
• One - was twisting your legs around the elastic and then jumping high, so that the elastic had time to snap back into place, and landing with one foot on each piece of elastic.

I would love to hear if anyone can remember any more rhymes/actions for French skipping that I can teach Sophie ...

A Very Hungry Caterpillar birthday party

Justin turned three on Saturday (where has that time gone?) and I organised a Very Hungry Caterpillar party to celebrate.

As his birthday is straight after Christmas and New Year I have learned over the past two birthdays to get organised early to avoid unnecessary stress and so I started a board on Pinterest some time ago and pinned a few ideas. In reality not many of them made the cut but it was still fun finding out what other people had done.

I got the inspiration for the invitations here but played around with various VHC images and ended up with something that I was really pleased with.

Somehow the numbers at the party snowballed (no pun intended!) and we ended up with eight 2 to 3 year olds, three older 5 and 6 year old siblings, party guest's mums and Justin's grandparents. Thankfully, it was a sunny day and we were able to use the kitchen, conservatory and garden patio. 

I had lots of plans to make VHC bunting but in the end I fell in love with the paper lantern caterpillar idea found here. I hung the lanterns up with thread suspended between two cabinets and fixed some spotty wrapping paper behind to hide a lovely but detracting picture. It was quite effective (although I couldn't get the eyes quite right) but the lanterns were smaller than I expected and in hindsight I didn't think it was worth the extravagant c.£20 it cost to buy them.

There was no real structure to the party, the little ones were allowed to play with toys I'd left out for them but I did include a couple of games for them. We had the obligatory pass-the-parcel and also a great game called Pop the Bubbles. I found these on the Party Pieces website and they are basically rectangles of large bubble bubble wrap that the children have to jump up and down on. Not surprisingly, they all had great fun popping the bubbles. I will definitely do this again but may buy my own roll of large bubble bubble wrap for next time!

I also planned a version of musical statues with printed sheets of numbers: when the music stops you call a number out and the children have to stand on that number. We didn't have time to play this but I might play it with Justin anyway to help him learn what numbers look like.

The party bags were spotty cellophane bags and I put VHC sticker sheets, a VHC pin badge, a small bottle of bubbles, a small packet of sweets and a multi-coloured colouring pencil and VHC colouring sheet in each.

Sadly I forgot to take many photos, and didn't even manage to get one of the table before most of the food had been eaten.

I did manage get a photo of the older children having a great time eating their food outside as a picnic.

The party went smoothly and most importantly all the children had a great time, especially the birthday boy.

© 2012 Nicola Noble

Fairy birthday - the party

So the last few weeks were spent finalising the plans for Sophie's fifth birthday. I'd seen a cute fairy toadstool cake in my birthday cake bible (Debbie Brown's 50 Easy Party Cakes) and persuaded her to have a fairy themed party so that I could make the cake!

I found some lovely Disney Fairy invitations on family.com (which also has lots of pretty Disney fairy things to make) and edited them slightly. I then added glitter paint to the flowers and fairy wings.

We held it at the local community centre and it is a great space - big enough to lay the food table at one end, have craft tables at the other and space in the middle for the party games. In addition to balloons, I decorated the hall with some pink netting and crepe flowers tied into swathes.

I decided to keep to traditional party games: musical chairs (with a twist), pass-the-parcel, pin the butterfly on the flower and musical statues. I also set up activity tables to keep them occupied when they first arrived/ inbetween games: a craft (dragonfly peg magnets), fairy colouring and tattoo transfers.

Instead of using chairs, we played musical pillows to start. Each child had a pillow or cushion, then the pillows got taken away a few at a time and when the music stopped they had to all fit onto the remaining pillows. It ended up with all 18 children on one pillow which they all found funny.

We also played pin the butterfly on the flower. I had great fun painting a flower and adding a few fun bugs to it. I scanned a butterfly that Sophie had drawn and added a space to write their names on, then printed and cut out the image and finished with a square of double-sided sticky tape to the back ready to peel.

 

I was a bit concerned that I was being overly ambitious with the dragonfly peg magnet craft: a) it was a bit fiddly; b) I was letting them loose with my die-cutter; and c) would the boys like it; but I needn't have worried. I left my 16 year old niece in charge and almost everyone made one, with one of the boys making four! Details on how they made these to follow later ...

I decided to get green paper bags for the party bags (I don't like the flimsy plastic ones) and folded the top down and sealed with a label (Tinkerbell  for the girls and Terence for the boys and their names). The dragonflies they had made were then pegged to the top at the end of the party. The only downside of sealing the bags before the party was that I couldn't put the cake into the bags as they left. 

The whole party was a great success. I know how incredibly lucky I was to have hubbie running the games (he is a natural party entertainer!) and the help of both sets of grandparents, my sister and her two teenage children. And most importantly Sophie had a great time and there were no tears for the first time in five years!

© 2011 Nicola Noble