High School Musical Party -9yr- Waiter Game

For my daughter's 9th birthday she wanted a High School Musical theme. 

For the invitations we printed up a sheet on the computer to make it look like the paper kids receive telling them who their teacher is at the beginning of the year.  We put the East High Mascot on it, and had East High School" across the top "Dear Students and Families  Welcome back!  I hope you had a nice vacation.  Enclosed is your homeroom teacher assignment and schedule for our next semester which begins Febuary 3.  I'm looking forward to  another great year!  Then it stated that their homeroom teacher was Ms. Darbus and it showed their class schedule.  It included science class basketball practice lunch auditions scholastic decathlon job at Lava Springs and detention.  It said that school started on Feb 3 at 1pm.  Call the principal (gave my name and phone #) so we could have an accurate head count.  It said to wear red and white to show your school spirit. 

For the decorations we used red and white.  We had streamers and helium balloons around the table (cafeteria) and stairway.  We made a big banner that said "Go Wildcats!" and hung it by the front door.  On the front door we made a sign that said "Welcome to East High."  We had various things in each area that I'll get to later.  We hung up picutes for an old HSM calender all around.  Fortunately we have a large playroom and I sectioned it off by hanging cheap tablecloths to the ceiling. 

When the girls arrived I asked them to surrender their cell phones. I told them that this was school and they would be graded on their performance and sent a report card next week.  (The thank you note will be in report card form.) I carried around a clipboard with their names on it and took notes.)   Then we went to science class.  We decorated this with science posters and a microscope and test tubes we had. We did "sink or float" experiments. I typed up a worksheet graph and the girls predicted if the item would sink or float (we filled up an old fish tank) and then we dropped them in.  Some were very tricky. 

Then we did an "egg drop".  I put the girls in 4 teams of 3 and each had a bag of materials they could use to protect an egg to be dropped from the top of the foyer stairs on to the tile.  They loved this. One even survived.  Then I handed my daughter my cell phone (she didn't know what I was doing) and it rang in her hand.  I made a big deal of her getting in trouble and sent them to detention where they had to made a project to decorate the stage for Ms. Darbus.  We made no sew pillows from HSM fabric that I found online at Hancock.  They brought them to me when they were done so I could "grade" them.  I had a big sign on the wall that said "Detention Room".   

Next we went to work at Lava Springs.  Here we played a "waiter" game.  The kids were split into 2 teams and given a tray.  Down at the other end of the room (in our plastic play kitchen) were 2 piles of identical play food.  They had to take turns running down to the food picking up one piece balancing it on the tray and going back to the next girl to hand it off.  The first team with all their food on the tray won. We made a large "Welcome to Lava Springs" poster and a Menu that we hung on the wall here.   Next we went to "basketball practice."  We had large "EHS" signs we made on the wall next to the Fisher Price basketball.  The girls took turns trying to make shots backward.  (We "scored" them by how close they were.)  Then they tried forward. 

Next we played a "hot potato" type game with the basketball.  I played "Keep your head in the game" and they passed the ball around.  When the music stopped whoever was holding the ball had to pick a slip of paper.  I had things like "act like Sharpay when the food fell on her" or "Dance like Ryan" and the rest of the group had to guess who they were and what they were doing.    After that we had the "Scholastic Decathlon".  They were in 2 teams again and I asked 20 trivia questions from both movies.  They took turns answering them and if they got it wrong the other team could steal. The team that had the most right scored an "A". 

Next we went to the "cafeteria" for cake.  I made a red cake that had "High School Musical" on it in yellow with red and white M&Ms around the sides.  We ate off styrofoam trays and had milk in cartons like at school.  Our centerpiece was a HSM bucket we had filled with inflatable mics.  They sang Happy Birthday into them it was very cute.  Then we took them and went back downstairs and sang karaoke.  We had a sign on the wall that said "Auditions sign up" and it had a list of all the karaoke songs we had available.  The girls paired off and each pair sang a song.  Then the adults started to arrive.  For the finale we sang "We're all in this together."  I also had an inflatable guitar and sax that they used. 

For goodies I had found HSM calendars at 75% off.  They also got a popcorn bag (Dollar Tree) that had a baseball pencil and a plastic basketball filled with red/white M&Ms.  I made sleeves that went over microwave popcorn packets that had the HSM kids on it and said "Thank you for "popping" in to R's 9th birthday!  I also printed out photos from HSM and covered them in clear contact paper and stuck them to magnet sheets to make refridg. Magnets.  So they had the mic pillow calendar and small bag of stuff.  It took about 2.5hrs. (we don't do gifts) and I think everyone had a great time. "