Hockey Party -8yr- Hockey Money Prizes

Hockey Party (8 year old)  My son and his friends are hockey crazy so when my son wanted a street hockey birthday party I wasn't surprised; the challenge was to make it special as these kids play street hockey every day they aren't playing ice hockey! 

Everyone wore a hockey jersey and received a showing-up bonus of $500 in hockey money when they arrived.  We sprayed watered-down tempera paint on the packed snow on the street to make face-off circles, the crease and red and blue lines. We had a portable fire pit blazing to warm up and  roast weiners. 

Throughout the party, we handed out "hockey money" for good sportsmanship, good manners, good teamwork, etc. (NOT goals, as we wanted to downplay the competitive nature of the party). We made the $100 bills with different NHL hockey logos on it (downloaded from Internet).  The kids had no idea what the money was for, but they loved getting it and seeing what teams were on each one. 

We also did "hockey bowling" by shooting a puck at 10 pins in front of a hockey net. The pins were 2-litre plastic pop containers with NHL logos (from Internet) taped on with packing tape and filled and frozen with water and tempera paint inside to match the color of the team depicted.

We went indoors where we had lots of hockey banners, pennants, posters (from my son's room) decorating the walls. We then played straight-line "hockey bingo" where we used made-up cards with 20 squares of NHL logos (from Internet) and pucks (flat black rocks from $1 store).  Winner got hockey money and after winning, had to clear his card but nobody else did until we had 5 winners.  This made for way more winners, more money and more excitement!  

At this point, we tried to make the payouts such that everyone had approximately the same amount of money.  Finally, the highlight for the kids was the hockey auction where they could spend their money. We revealed a whole table of items ranging in value from $0.25 to $5.00.  As this party cost us nothing except a LOT of preparation time, we weren't scared to invest in some good quality prizes; lots were hockey related, but not all.  Again we made sure that the auction was explained well and some kids chose to get lots of little stuff and others spent all their $20,000 on one big item. 

Then they decided to trade among them and the excitement level was unbelievable with everyone going home a winner!