Avatar Party 5yr

My 5 year old daughter Isabella is a huge fan of the Avatar shows series & that's what she chose for her birthday theme. We held it in our back yard, ~25 kids & their families in attendence. INVITATIONS: from uprintinvitations.com where they had the avatar theme - u make it yourself by adding child's picture & downloading the final image ($10 cost), which i then forwarded to be printed as a 4x6 photo at my nearest photo developing place & just added the envelopes from Staples (had to crop 1/3 to fit). It said to come to the Avatar Academy & learn the 4 elements. DECORATIONS: We printed AVATAR coloring pages from the internet took it to Kinkos & had them enlarged top well over poster size - we made them black & white since all cost $6 7 had my kids paint them themselves before the party glued tehm on cardboard box backing & cut them out (fingers hurt but it was cherap & doable); streamers in 4 colors for the 4 kingdoms - green red light blue & dark blue. we just threw streamers all over trees around yard - picking different areas to coordinate (our pond area was the Water Kingdom steps to upper pattio are from rocks so that was teh Earth Kingdom. Our playground was the Air Temple since they're high up...etc). CRAFT: painting shells & making shell neckleces (representing the Water Kingdom). We use markers which made it no-mess & worker perfectly. The shells we collected over the summer at the beach - focusing on large ones & ones with holes already in them. Washed them in bleach water to take smell out added string for the loop & purchased a lot of 50 blue organza necklpaces on e-bay ($8 with shipping). ACTIVITIES: for AIR BENDING - we had bouncy house for kids to "learn to fly" ;& these air guns that shoot out bursts of air that we got frm Disney where kids had to knock over soda cans with bursts of air (this was better for older kids as little ones weren't strong enough to pull the air piece. but it was great for the husbands to shoot "air balls" from 25 feet at anyone - it was a great effect as people didn't expect to feel it). WATER BENDING - making bubbles. We watched on YouTube.com the amazing bubble man & copied some ideas - like putting smoke in the bubbles with a fog machine (that was awesome & easy to reproduce) making giant bubbles with the huge bubble wand bubbles inside a bubble & putting the children inside a bubble. First we did a little show showing the kids different tricks & then we set up all sorts of bubble wands for them to make bubbles everywhere. For the liquid we used home made bubble liquid made from Dawn glycerine & water - recipe found on internet- (worked the best out of all ones we've tried & it was cheap for the large amount of liquid we needed). We purchased wands & bubble trumpets from tangenttoy.com. For putting kids in bubble we used small inflatable pool & hoola hoop placed a block inside so kids didn't get wet. (another water idea we had was throwing water balloons @ Azula but we it was too much work to fill so many balloons). EARTH BENDING: I pre-packed sandwich-size bags of popcorn & kids had a boys vs girls popcorn fight  FIRE BENDING: after cake we roasted marshmellows over outdoor chimenea we have CAKE:  - 2 tiered round cake - all white simple icing on outside. I made an Apa out of fondent for the top 1 week ahead(it came out great & it wasn't too hard & i've never worked with fondent before & i'm no great artist) then I printed just the right size characters from Avatar that I got off internet took them to Kinkos & has them printed colored on Transparency paper then cut them out & placed them on sides of cake print side out all over the cake. Worker perfect ink didn't come off & white cake background made all colors of the characters pop. FOOD: tried to do Asian fare but ended up going simple and made normal kid fare - pizza bagels dragon chicken nuggets tortellinis & mini egg-rolls 7 adult food (your choice) desserts -   dirt cups made of chocolate pudding crumbled chololate grahm crackers & gummy worm inside (to represent EARTh kingdom) watermelon cut out like a ship FAVORS: gave out big bubble wands i got at $.99 store (got to get ahead in summer) with bubble liqid bottle 7 copy of Avatar episodes on DVD somene made for me (since not all kids knew who Avatar was - i thought it would be a nice ty-in to why we did all the things we did). To avoid sending Thank you cards later - I printed on the sleeve for the DVD a label that said "Thank you for coming to my party. Love Isabella".  hope this is all helpful as this site has been my #1 source of party ideas in the past & I wanted to give back - as I didn't see anything on THIS theme. Thanks you."