Little People Party -5yr- Pass The Parcel

For my daughter's fifth birthday she wanted a Little People theme. This was a real challenge!

Party goods were purchased from Birthday Express and the grocery store had a cute Little People cake, so that was a good start.

I decorated each child's place with a Little People placemat (from Birthday Express) and a placeholder with a picture of a Little Person and the child's name. They also had crackers -- the type you pull and a prize pops out -- at each place.

For an arrival activity, I printed coloring pages off of the Fisher Price website. (This site also has several party ideas.)

When all the children had arrived, we made party hats. I flattened a party hat to use for a pattern and cut hats from white poster board. The kids decorated them with stickers, markers and streamers and wore them during the party.

For games, we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, musical chairs and Pass the Parcel. If you've never played Pass the Parcel, you take a small gift and wrap it in several layers of paper. Have the children sit in a circle and pass the gift around while music plays. When the music stops, the child who has the gift unwraps a layer of paper then play continues. When the last layer of paper is opened, there is a gift. I put a small bottle of bubbles for each child.

For older children, you could have a single prize for the lucky child who wins. The kids really, really liked this game.

Following the games, everyone took turns at whacking a pinata. Since the storebought ones are so hard to break, I made a traditional paper mache pinata. It wasn't hard to make and the kids were able to break it open themselves. The pinata was filled with three pieces of candy for each child, art supplies and a few other small items. Rather than the usual smash and grab" at the end of the pinata we gathered everything up in one bag and I divided everything equally among the kids.

I also bought a CD of dance party songs and they all did the Hokey Pokey. I had also planned The Chicken Dance and the Bunny Hop but we ran out of time!

For favors I got the empty favor boxes from Birthday Express and put a Little People figure in each box. You can buy them in sets of three or five or so at toy stores. Then the pinata items were the remainder of the favors."