Pokemon Party (7-9yr) Pokemon Bingo

The idea of a joint Pokemon party for my two boys started when I could no longer afford to take them and their friends to the cinema.  Their birthdays are just after Christmas and all the prices go up during the holidays :-(  I started off sending out invites which had a picture of Ash and Pikachu on it and the words I choose you!" with all the details of the party on the back.  The party was for two and a half hours with lunch in the middle.  As the guests arrived I had a table with colouring and word searches/mazes/join the dots which are all available on the web at  http://www.coloring.ws/pokemon-ws.htm and http://www.dltk-kids.com/pokemon/printables.htm. 

Then the games started! Most of the game ideas I got off this and other sites but I changed things a bit ;-) This is what I did Pokeball Relay Race - 4x washing baskets balloons - 2 teams run to one end of the room squish a balloon between 2 people and without touching it get it back to the empty basket. Pin the embers on Charmander - print a large picture of Charmander (I did it on 4 x A4 sheets) and mount it on cardboard. Cut out orange/red/yellow crepe or ordinary paper and attach a sticky pad to each one. Meowth Chocolate Coin Hunt (Meowth loves shiny things!) - I printed out about twenty small images of Meowth and mounted them on cardboard then hid them around the room with a small pile of chocolate coins.  We then stopped for lunch :-) I didn't do anything special here - just normal party food.

Then came the cake and blowing out the candles - I made a pokeball cake - a 10" round cake and covered one half in white roll-out icing and the other half in red roll-out icing and a strip of black roll-out icing down the centre with some black and white circles on top. I piped (using a bought black icing pen) my boys' names and ages - one on each side and topped with candles. It was easy to do and looked great! 

Pokemon Bingo - whilst they were all still sat down they played two rounds of bingo (http://www.dltk-kids.com/pokemon/printables.htm) - playing for a line first then two lines then a full house. Pea & straw relay race - dried peas and straws and plastic bowls - 2 teams transfer dried peas from one side to another by sucking through a straw. Pass the parcel - a perennial party favourite - I twisted the idea by making the kids don big daddy-sized ski gloves each time the music stopped to make it more tricky to open the parcel :-)

I had one circle of girls and one of boys and two separate parcels. If you do this too - use as little sticky tape on the parcel as possible to give the kids a fighting chance of unwrapping it! Balloon Pop! - my great idea here was to put small Pokemon figures (1" high purchased from eBay) in 'pokeballs' (empty Kinder Egg toy shells) inside a load of balloons and get the kids to pop them to rescue the Pokemon.

Unfortunately the necks of the balloons were too small to fit them in so I ended up just putting the Kinder balls in the party bags. The kids still had great fun popping all the balloons though!! Togepi egg & spoon race - hard boiled eggs decorated to look like togepi - racing up and down the room with the egg balanced on a spoon.

Guess the number of Pokeballs in a jar - I put a load of Strawberry & Cream bonbons into a clean jam jar and got each of the kids to write down how many they thought were in there. Card swap - I then handed out the party bags with the Pokemon figures and a few sweets (candy) in and a small bag of Pokemon cards (I bought a bulk off eBay and split them up so everyone got at least 10 of varying types) and the kids had fun checking out what they had and swapping with their friends. 

All the children seemed to have a great time (and one 9 year old went back home and exclaimed to Daddy that he had so much fun and that was an awesome party!). That was all the thanks I needed :-D  I hope this party description can be of help to someone else. Just one caution - Pokemon items are not readily available in the UK nowadays (2012/2013) so much of the Pokemon stuff I got was bought on eBay and some came from China - so make sure you plan far enough in advance to leave enough time for postage!!"