Olympics Party -7yr- Gold Medal Invite

For my daughter's seventh birthday, we had an Olympics party. 

The invitations were large gold medals (about 6" dia.) with a red/white/blue ribbon attached that invitees could wear.  On the invitations we asked that friends RSVP with the name of the country that they wanted to represent.  The making of their country's flag was the warm-up activity as guests arrived.  In advance of the party, my daughter and I used the atlas to make a light pencil sketch of each country's flag on a 12x14" paper.  We lightly printed colors to be used in each area of the flag. 

Guests arrived  to a large banner that said "Welcome Athletes" with the Olympic rings on it and proceeded to color their flag with markers or crayons.  When they were done we taped a thin dowel (craft store) to the paper flag so the flags could be held for the Opening Ceremonies.  My daughter led the parade of countries with  a torch (wrapping paper tube covered in foil with tissue paper flames). The group paraded around the house to the Olympics theme and then went into the dining room for lunch.  I had one food from each country (egg rolls, small pizzas, grapes, cheese, kiwi, etc.) and as they were served they guessed the country of origin of each food. 

After this it was time for games.  Each guest had a name tag with a colored star on it to denote their team.  The teams worked together on events to achieve the best team time so that every ability could contribute to each event.  In our basement we had the "biathlon" the kids had to blow a large group of pompoms across a table with a straw; then they did a measured standing long jump.  The parent helper timed the first event and took and average length of the jumps for the group score. 

The team then moved on to the second station outside which was the Frisbee toss/maze event.  In the Frisbee toss each athlete had three throws to see how many gallon milk jugs they could hit off the wall.  The team score was the total number hit.  Then they went to the soccer maze where they stood in premarked areas and kicked the ball around the stations.  They did the event twice and we took the fastest time.  The next event was the hoolahoop/pogo stick (counted total number of jumps and hoolas). 

Finally was the obstacle course where they crawled through a maze, walked a chalk line while looking through a pair of binoculars backwards, and rode a tricycle to the finish line.  Each team was awarded a first place ribbon for the event they did best in  the "Closing Ceremonies".  The cake was the five Olympic rings (single layer 9" rounds with a small circle cut out of the center in red, blue, black, green, and yellow). 

Goodie bags included small American flags, an Olympic pin from the 2002 games (the proceeds of these went to the 9/11 fund), and a small wood picture frame painted with the Olympic rings and my daughter's name (a good activity for my daughter to do with paint pens, frames from Ikea). They also took home the flag they made. It was a very fun party which seemed to entertain both boys and girls.