As the weather warms up, many people start getting the urge to shift their free-time activities outdoors. Cold winter weather often causes people to go slightly stir crazy, especially when the first warm day hits. What better way to welcome spring and summer than with a block party? Whether you plan a block party every year or this is your first (hopefully of many), there are many ways to make your planning easier.
Quick and Easy Block Party Planning
Turn your yard (and your neighbors’ yards) into one big picnic site. Yes, many block parties are cookouts, but people usually plan to bring table and chairs. Why not simply throw some blankets on the grass and allow your kids to eat while sitting on the ground? Also, it gives you the chance to enjoy the simplicity that is a picnic—when is the last time you (or your kids) went on a picnic? Can you think of a better way to ring in spring than with a picnic? To make your picnic block party fun and slightly whimsical, find red gingham table covers and use those as your picnic blankets! The fun part here is that your kids might be slightly confused while they watch Mom roll red and white plastic onto the ground. Then, begin to set out plates and napkins—take this chance to try eco-friendly tableware. Why not? They even come in a picnic kit! Either assign specific people to bring certain foods or just call it a potluck and have everyone bring something. The men could have a grilling competition and the kids could decorate aprons for their dads.
Block Party Activity Planning
Every party needs a game! Your block party could use a few games, too. Definitely pick out a piñata, because there is nothing quite as entertaining as watching kids scramble around for candy once the piñata bursts open. You can look into card games, too—Uno is always a favorite! Also, try to plan a few sports-related games just for fun for your party guests that are in the pre-teen age range. Go for a bean bag toss and plan a pick-up game of basketball or soccer.
Gather your neighbors to help you welcome spring and summer with a huge block party! Relax with a picnic, enjoy the outdoors that you’ve been kept away from all winter. Have fun with your neighbors and make some new friends—you could even get a jump start on planning your next block party!
Boys love movie nights and those deliciously fun parties that Mom or Dad create. Jump into an adventure and plan your guy’s next b-day bonanza. We’ve compiled a list of top, boys birthday party ideas for 2012.
Angry Birds Birthday Party for Boys
Invite the red, blue, and white birds to collide with the pigs at your son’s Angry Birds, boys birthday party.
He’s all action and he loves to save the day. Give your guy and his buds their own hero status. Ask them to come to the party dressed as their favorite career hero. Honor those fire fighters, police men, soldiers, and astronauts. Watch an episode of the 1970′s Emergency movie or series. All six seasons are now on dvd and are still a find for elementary-aged, boys sleepover parties.
If your agents are too young for Mission Impossible, a Phineas and Ferb pack will delight Disney fans ready for adventure. Hold your very own secret agent Phineas and Ferb Wii tournament!
Boys Car Birthday Party
Push it into overdrive. Younger boys are sure to love Hot Wheels or Cars 2. Bring out the red color scheme!
Throw a set of real keys to your older boys- or… maybe just the key tags. Create personalized key tags.
Barrel of Monkeys Boys Birthday Party
Your little monkies are ideal for the monkey party pack! Usher the tail swingers to your favorite playground or bouncy house to burn off that excess monkey cake energy. Decorate any party space with the monkey arch & tree and monkey piñata. Then, play pin the tail on the monkey. For a quiet break, slip in a Curious George dvd or take the boys to see Chimpanzee.
For your teen age primates, pop in King Kong orPlanet of the Apes. After ringing neighborhood door bells for a treasure hunt of monkey items- bananas, combs, yellow hat, etc send the boys home with monkey favor packs.
Wimpy Kid Boys Party
Greg and Rodrick rule and so does this boy favorite series. As guests arrive, place the name of one of the Wimpy Kid characters on each boy’s back. Encourage them to mingle by asking each other about their characters. The scene is set for a cartoon party in black and white. Hang black and white balloons with red streamers. Let the boys create a Wimpy kid cartoon storyboard and homemade movie together. Keep your computer screens on these Wimpy kid games and serve plenty of chocolate ice cream. Watch the Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2.
Fill miniature back packs with plenty of school-themed party favors.
Underwater Boys Birthday Party
Based on a true story, Big Miracle is the ideal boy’s birthday party theme for arctic buffs, swimmers, divers, and all around water and ice lovers.
These dazzling under the sea invitations welcome your boy’s deep sea adventurers to a magical birthday party. “Believe in the power of one” or “We accomplish together” could be the messages on your ocean murals. Turn your basement into an under the sea party that truly takes the boys to new depths of fun. Ocean creatures, including whales, swim in the air as helium-filled, sea balloons. Place your whale-shaped cake in the middle of Bermuda blue tableware. Say goodbye with mini fish bowls filled with ocean favors.
War Horse Boys Birthday Party
The soldiers of World War I fought for country with a cavalry of horses. War Horse chronicles the devotion of a boy for his steed:
Invite your son’s best buds to see War Horse (rated PG 13) and then come home to a western party or head to a rescue horse stable for a tour. Colorize your snack bar with green plastic tableware and serve soup in an old army pot. For the taste of France, add grapes, cheese, and crackers. You might even add a misty woods photo backdrop here and there. Place dollar party favors in a handkerchief to give to the boys at the party’s end with a galloping brown horse balloon.
What are your favorite boys birthday party ideas and movie themes?
We’ve put together a collection of party games and activities to keep a group entertained ’til midnight, perfect for a New Year’s party (but not just for New Year’s!).
Though we’re writing today mostly with adults in mind, these ideas can be adapted for teens and even younger party people who get to stay up late.
7 p.m. Guests are arriving. You’ll need some ice-breakers! Start the laughter and conversation right away by displaying a photo stand-in that goes with your theme: hula dancers for a luau theme, red carpet entrance for a Hollywood event, and so on. Station a designated photographer near the stand-in for hilarious keepsakes.
Another party trend that’s gaining traction lately is “Bring Your Own Appetizer.” If you try this, let guests know in advance that you’re going “potluck” in this area and how many servings of a favorite appetizer each person should bring. A natural complement to this is a “Make Your Own” bar for champagne cocktails or martinis. People will naturally share their recipes, concoctions and pleasure at trying something new.
Other must-haves for Hour One: catering party trays, Easy Carry appetizer plates and new Party Time martini glasses from Party Tableware.
8 p.m. Begin a scavenger hunt, road rally or geocaching activity. Arrange for designated drivers or alternative transportation if you’ve served liquor; or if it’s a teen party, set ground rules about traveling in groups.
Scavenger hunts do not need to be outdoors and could take place in a mall or museum. Also, items and landmarks on the list can be photographed instead of captured, which widens the possibilities.
If you do have an outdoor venue for a nighttime hunt, set out small LED lights and glow party favors for participants to find, just for fun.
Other products to consider for Hour Two: New LED Fairy Berries in Themed Lights.
9 p.m. Change the pace a little with cards, mad libs or bingo. Make them theme-related if possible, for example play blackjack or roulette for a casino theme, or create customized bingo cards to match a holiday theme with the help of online resources.
More considerations for Hour Three: Casino dealers’ vests and green visors and personalized photo playing card cases from Casino Party Favors.
10 p.m. Play “Guess the Celebrity.” Write down the names of celebrities on sticky notes, one name per sheet. To play, place a sticky note on a player’s forehead so that he or she cannot read it but everyone else can. The player must ask yes-or-no questions of the rest of the participants. If you like, you could place limits on each person’s time for guessing, or on the number of questions each player can ask. Reward successful players who guess their celebrities with party beads, Hollywood-style trophies or winners’ medals from Party Favors.
11p.m. Many people enjoy ringing in the New Year outdoors around a fireplace or bonfire. If this is not your scene (or it’s not New Year’s) pull out a trivia game for indoor play. From Pirates to Princesses, it is possible to find trivia games, questions and quizzes online for virtually any party theme you can name.
At any rate, we think a winter party nearing midnight calls for a soup buffet and really good bread to top off the night, no matter what the activity!
Other products to check out for Hour Five: Noir mugs from Personalized Party Supplies, party serving sets from Tableware/Catering.
Before you know it, turkey day will be here and you might be the one in charge of entertaining friends and family on this beloved American holiday. Luckily, there are plenty of fun activities, games and prizes that can keep your guests entertained long after a big Thanksgiving dinner. Plan to donate some of your time to benefit others, too!
Thanksgiving Theater Games
Do you have aspiring child actors in the family? Not only will the dramatic love creating their own stick puppets, but they’ll also relish coming up with a Thanksgiving play. Use the puppets as a learning tool about what happened on the first Thanksgiving when the pilgrims arrived in America. Even adults can get in on the fun and can take turns presenting their puppets to show the children what they know about the first Thanksgiving.
Free Thanksgiving Games
Adults and children will get a kick out of playing Thanksgiving charades, but keep things interesting and go beyond the usual Thanksgiving symbols like turkey, pilgrims and Native Americans. Have each person in the group come up with five things they are thankful for and write each on a separate slip of paper. Put all the papers in a bowl, mix them up, and have players take turns acting out whatever they pull out of the bowl. As a bonus, see if anyone can guess who was thankful for that particular thing.
Deliver holiday gifts.
Turkey Pins
Nothing says Thanksgiving quite like a turkey. Imagine a craft your guests can make and keep for Thanksgiving celebrations for years to come. Combine foam, feathers and googly eyes to create miniature turkey pins. Have extra glue, glitter, and sequins around for those who wish to add a little sparkle to their turkeys. For personalized turkey pins, cut out pictures you have of your guests and paste their faces on the pins.
Reflections
This activity will get adults and children thinking about what they are most thankful for. After a delicious Thanksgiving meal, have each person say why they are thankful for the person to their right. Then, have everyone around the table name something they are specifically thankful for in the current year. Make it a Thanksgiving tradition and have someone serve as the designated “record keeper.” Each year, pull out the record of what everyone has been thankful for and enjoy reminiscing about Thanksgivings from past years.
Thanksgiving Football Fun
Not everyone wants to watch football all afternoon on Thanksgiving weekend, so make sure your guests have plenty of opportunities to participate in football-themed activities and games. Besides playing traditional touch-football in the yard, family and friends will get a kick out of a flick football game. This is a game that can be played inside if the fall air has gotten too chilly for a full-sized game outdoors.
Donate prizes and knick-knacks.
Thanksgiving Prizes- Don’t send them home empty-handed
Who had the best pumpkin pie this year? Who won charades? Did grandpa correctly predict the scores of the Thanksgiving Day football games? Don’t let anyone go home empty handed! A good host will find plenty of reasons to award prizes to each guest at their Thanksgiving party. Personalized items to commemorate the day always make for a special prize, as well as goodie bags. Fill orange and brown gift bags with candy and tie with Thanksgiving-themed ribbon.
Give Back to Those in Need
After giving thanks for all the fun you had playing games and working on activities together, donate your favors, toiletries, and nick knacks to Operation Christmas Child or another charitable organization. Spread Thanksgiving love and well being to others!
Most hostesses wish to provide all of the bridal shower guests with a small bridal shower favor for attending and honoring the bride. We offer a couple of choices for simple yet special wedding shower favors that make a perfect way of saying, “Thank you”.
Our Personalized Bubbles are adorable and a great reminder of the upcoming special day!
Fill frosted boxes with small candies in the colors of the wedding. These favors look great on the table at each place setting. You can attach a small card with the guest’s names on each one and use them as placecards for assigned seating if desired.
Give your guests a nice scrapbook to record all their memories of the shower and the wedding.
Another bridal shower favor idea that serves as a very nice keepsake and place to store precious memories are keepsake boxes. Your guests will be thrilled with these simple yet elegant boxes.
Bridal Shower Party Activities & Games
Play the Bridal Shower Game
A fun game that allows your guests to become familiar with the groom as well as the bride, is the “How Well Do You Know The Bride” game. Here’s how you play: Before the day of the shower, ask the groom several questions about the bride. For example, “What is her favorite flower?” or “What is her dream date?” Videotape his answers to each of the questions. At the shower, ask the same series of questions to the guests and have them write down their answers. After all the questions have been answered, ask each one to the bride and have her give her answer. Next play the videotape of her fiancee’s answers – just for fun. The one that gets the most answers right wins! Not only is this a fun way to include the groom, you learn more about the guest of honor!
Playing “Bridal Gift Bingo” ensures that the guests will pay close attention to the gifts as they are opened! Before the bride opens any presents, have each guest create their own bingo card (to make it easier, print up blank cards before hand for them). They must fill in each square with a shower gift that the bride might open that day. For example, one box would be bath towels, another box might be pots and pans. As the bride opens her presents, the guests can mark off a box if they wrote down that particular item. The first person to get bingo wins!
For this “Think Fast” game, everyone sits in a circle. The bride begins the game by throwing a garter to someone. While attempting to catch it, she must name something found in the wedding ceremony (i.e. flowers, alter, camera). Once the garter is caught, it is quickly tossed to someone else who must name something. If she cannot answer quickly enough, that person is out of the game. Play until one person is left!
“The Mystery Spice Game” is always fun. Before the shower, take the labels off of 10 spice jars and number them. Pass the spices around and have the guests guess what they are by sight and smell – but no tasting! The guest with the most correct answers wins!
For a funny yet meaningful moment, play “Name That Advice”. Go around the room and have the guests give the bride a piece of advice on marriage. The fun part of this is that the advice must be something that starts with the first letter of their name. For example, Jodi could tell the bride that “Jell-O is easy to make for a quick meal!”, or Laura could tell the bride to “Love him every moment”. At the end of this game, you could, as a group, award the bride with wedding favors.
This game works best if the attendees are good friends or all relatives. It brings a little embarrassment and lots of laughs! First, pass out 10 pieces of candy to each person. The object of this game is the keep your candy while making everyone else eat theirs! The guest of honor starts by stating something true about herself. For example, “I never dated two guys at the same time”. Any one that has done that must eat a piece of their candy. The game continues to the next player who makes a true statement about herself. After everyone has had a turn, the person with the most candy left wins.
Couple’s Shower Party Activities
Playing some games (no matter how silly they seem) will really liven up any shower. Here are some tried-and-true hits to really keep things going during your party!
Play the newlywed game! You’ll need four couples to play this game. The men leave the room and women are asked questions. (For instance, who is his favorite sports player? Who is her favorite male movie star? What is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to him/her?) Be sure to record all of their answers! The men are brought back in and asked the same questions. Then reverse the whole process and have the women leave. The couple with the most matched answers wins!
For this “Ring Toss” game, choose as many couples that want to play. One person sits in a chair and holds a wooden spoon in their mouth with the handle sticking out. The partner stands 6-8 feet away and tosses 10 large rings, one at a time, attempting to hook them on their partner’s spoon. The person with the spoon can help to catch it by maneuvering their head, but cannot get out of the chair. The couple with the most rings wins!
See how many guests know their partners with this fun game! Hang a clothesline across your room and place a couple of sheets over it. Have the men stand behind the sheets, exposing their legs and feet only. The women need to identify their partner by his legs only. They must stand in front of the legs that she believes are her partners. When the sheets are removed, the prizes go to the women that were correct. You would be surprised by how many women cannot identify their partner’s legs!
Ask trivia questions about the bride and groom throughout the party — how they first met, color of their eyes, first date, likes, dislikes, etc. Give out small prizes for correct answers, or the person with the most correct answers wins.
Take a kitchen junk drawer and ask a specific person to walk around the room with it, allowing each guest to view the contents only for a few seconds (don’t tell them why they are looking at it). Then take the drawer away, pass out paper and have each person right down all the contents that they could remember. The person with the most correct wins. Or, you can add a twist to this and have the person that has passed the drawer around leave the room with the drawer. Then ask your guests to describe the person that was holding the drawer instead of the contents. This will really throw everyone off!
Host a karaoke competition! Have each person write down two famous songs about love or marriage on a piece of paper and put in a basket. Then have each person pick a slip and sing as much of the song as he or she can remember.
Create your own “Mad Lib” story by writing a story that tells the couple’s history as well as predicts the future. Leave out all of the important information and then, before reading it, ask the bride and groom to fill in the blanks. Remember, you ask them for an action, number, or noun for each of the blanks but they don’t know the sentence. When you read the story out loud (with the blanks filled in) it is hilariously funny!
Have each couple write something significant about themselves and the bride or groom. The bride then has to read each slip of paper and guess which couple wrote it.
Share your favorite bridal shower games and activities.
Do you, or someone you know, need some serious cheering up this year? Remember when we were kids and parties were supposed to be fun, not work? We can do that as adults, too. What if we throw a party that’s specifically designed to make us laugh the whole day (or night) through? Can we do this? Yes we can. Shindigz will help.
When we were kids, our parents may have hired a clown to entertain us. As adults, if it’s a very large party, we can hire a stand-up comic. Comics can be hired for 15 minutes to an hour long set. I suggest no more than a half hour, or get two comics to do 20 minutes each. Inform the comic ahead of time who your guest-of-honor is and some favorite things or quirks about them. Give the comic a little ammunition.
What party games did you like as a kid? Do you want to be active, or cerebral? You can be both if you play Celebrity.
Split into two groups.
Everyone puts 5-10 names of celebrities/characters/people you all know on slips of paper and into a hat.
Each round, one person from each group (at a time) will draw names from the hat and their group will have to guess the person. Save the papers of the names already drawn. Alternate group turns until you have finished all the names. Set a time limit of 1 ½ to 3 minutes.
Round 1: you can do or say anything about the name you draw.
Round 2: you have 3 words only to convey the name.
Round 3: total charades.
Therefore, people from both teams have to pay attention because the same names will come back each round. So even if you don’t know the name in the first round, you’ll know it by the next round. The game can be played without doing all 3 rounds. There are tons of variations, but it’s a lot of fun.
What was the most fun thing about going to others’ parties as a kid? Grab bags! We can make party favor bags for all our guests that’ll inspire them to keep their inner-kid alive inside for months to come. chocolate and candy are a must to include. You can design your own. Small games and puzzles are perfect also.
Get creative with fun ways to entertain. Don’t throw a stuffy party without the fun. Bring out the kid in all of us. Play!
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picnic? Can you think of a better way to ring in spring than with a picnic? To make your picnic block party fun and slightly whimsical, find red gingham table covers and use those as your picnic blankets! The fun part here is that your kids might be slightly confused while they watch Mom roll red and white plastic onto the ground. Then, begin to set out plates and napkins—take this chance to try eco-friendly tableware. Why not? They even come in a picnic kit! Either assign specific people to bring certain foods or just call it a potluck and have everyone bring something. The men could have a grilling competition and the kids could decorate aprons for their dads.
too. Definitely pick out a piñata, because there is nothing quite as entertaining as watching kids scramble around for candy once the piñata bursts open. You can look into card games, too—Uno is always a favorite! Also, try to plan a few sports-related games just for fun for your party guests that are in the pre-teen age range. Go for a bean bag toss and plan a pick-up game of basketball or soccer.
