Pokemon Party -9yr- Pok Mon Bingo

POKEMON PARTY  9 YEARS OLD   Before planning this party, I happily knew almost nothing about Pokemon.  No more, thanks to the official Pokemon website (check out the pokedex,) wikipedia, and my two sons. 

INVITATIONS - I made pokeball invitations using red, white and black card stock, red brads, glue stick, a black pen, and my scrapbooking circle cutter. For each invite I cut out a white circle, then a red half-circle, both about 3 inches in diameter. I attached the upper left corner of the red half-circle to the left side of the white circle using a small red brad (purchased at the craft/scrapbooking store.) I cut out a black line and glued it behind the red half-circle so about a half a centimeter showed. Then I cut out a small white circle and pasted it in the middle of a slightly larger black circle and glued this to the middle of the red half circle on the black line so it was exactly in the middle of the pokeball.  On the top half of the white circle, I wrote:  (Kid's name here), I chose you! Train to be a Pokemon Master at Pablo's 9th Birthday Party!  

Once the red half-circle rotates to open the pokeball, the date, time and place for the party (our house) and the rsvp number were revealed. Under that, I wrote, turn over and on the back was the following message: We're having a Pokemon Card Trading Zone at the party.  Please bring any Pokemon cards you want to trade in a Ziploc-style bag or a 3-ring binder labeled with your name.  Your cards will be stored in a safe place when you aren't trading them. Gotta catch 'em all!   I mailed the invites in white envelopes. They looked awesome.  

DECORATIONS - The color scheme was red, white and black (for pokeballs), which worked well in our home, especially with the Christmas decorations up.  I hung about 45 red, black and white air-filled balloons from the ceiling with white curling ribbon and scotch tape instead of buying helium-filled balloons.  It cost me $6 for 75 balloons that lasted for more than 4 days versus $6 for a dozen helium ones that last about 6 hours. Cheaper, longer lasting and I actually prefer the look of the balloons hanging down all over the place to a few small bunches in the corners.  It spreads the color out.  Make sure to leave a long length of curled curling ribbon hanging down from where you tape the balloon and it looks like the streamers that shoot out of confetti crackers. 

I also bought crepe paper streamers but ended up not needing to use them. I made a sign with a picture I googled from the internet of Ash Ketchum, Brock and Misty (the main human character from Pokemon and his friends) and about 8 Pokemon.  It read: Happy 9th Birthday Pablo!  (I used a lot of images from the web. The best way to find them is to google the specific names of the Pokemon you're looking for.)  I mounted this sign to red construction paper and hung it on the center of the main wall.  Around the rest of the wall, I taped about 40 pokeballs. You could make them or print pictures of them off the internet, but I happened to have a deck of Pokemon themed playing cards that were round.  The back looked like a pokeball with the logo: Pokemon, Gotta catch em all!  (By chance I found them at a garage sale earlier in the year.)  There are a few other decorations that will be described later.  I bought a black plastic tablecloth for the cake table and Pokemon themed plates and napkins from OTC. (I could only find them online.) We used clear glasses with red bendy straws and regular silverware. 

CAKE - For the first time in ages, I got a cake from a bakery and it saved me so much time and anxiety. Usually I am frosting up to the last minute before the party starts. Our cake was round and frosted to look like a Pokeball.  It looked great and was really yummy. 

ACTIVITIES - When guests arrived, we put their Pokemon cards in a brown paper grocery bag with their name on it and stuck it in the hall closet for safekeeping. On the closet door was a red and white sign I'd made that read: POK BANK - Keeping your Pokemon cards safe and secure.  It had a picture of a Persian on it to guard the loot.  The kids were then sent upstairs to PROFESSOR OAK'S LAB to get their pokeball and adopt their first Pokemon.  I had a red and white sign hanging in the doorway of the lab that had on it the Pokemon logo, a picture of a pokeball and the name of the lab.  Sitting on the windowsill of this room were all of my kids Pokemon stuffed animals and all the goody bags which looked like pokeballs. (I made them before the party. I'll explain in a bit.)  On a low table in the middle of the room was a tray with about 75 paper Pokemon on it. I copied images from the web, printed them in color and cut them out.  The kids chose as many Pokemon as they wanted and glued them with glue stick to the inside of their pokeballs.  Then they went to the upstairs playroom to goof around until most everyone had arrived.  While the kids were in the lab, Pokemon music played in the background. I got some good songs off the album, 2 B A Master.

POK BALL GOODY BAGS - I saw this idea on the internet a year ago and tweaked it a bit.  There's a picture and instructions at http://familycrafts.about.com/library/projects/blvalpok1.htm (just make it minus the valentine heart.)  I bought cheapo white paper plates and cut a bunch of them exactly in half.  I spray painted the backs of the cut plates red and once dry I stapled them front-to-front to the whole white plates so that it made a pocket.  Then I colored the black line on the edge of the red plate with a Sharpie.  I wrote the kids names on the back of their plate before the party.  They looked great.  These pokeballs were later taken downstairs and as the kids won prizes throughout the party, they put them in their pokeballs.  Everyone knew which was theirs based on the characters glued to them.  Once most kids arrived, I called them all out of the playroom and divided them into 2 teams  DIAMOND and PEARL.  I explained that they'd be playing as teams for many of the games. 

The first game was called GOTTA CATCH EM ALL!  Before the party, I hid 84 Pokemon cards throughout the downstairs rooms of our house.  While playing the song Pokerap in which the lyrics Gotta catch em all are sung, the kids walked around finding cards like an Easter egg hunt.  The teams turned their cards in to their trainers (my husband and me) and we counted them to see which team had found more. The winning team got to choose a prize (candy, Pokemon card or glow stick.)  We laid down some ground rules before the hunt started. No running, pushing, climbing on furniture or grabbing cards from other kids.  I also told them that they needn't open any drawers or cupboard doors to find cards.  If they broke the rules, we'd give some of their cards to the other team. This saved my house getting trashed. 

The next game was POK MON BINGO.  I printed bingo cards with pictures of Pokemon on them from www.DTKL.com, with Pablo's name at the top instead of the word bingo.  I slid the bingo cards into plastic page protectors and used red paper squares as markers.  The kids were amazed that I knew the names of all the Pokemon that I called out.  What they didn't know was that I had written the names of all the characters on the backs of the pictures.  (I looked them up in a book.)  I used Pokemon card tins belonging to my sons as the bins for holding the markers and the call pictures.  I awarded prizes to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd bingos and everyone got a prize for getting blackout. 

Then we had a craft.  CREATE YOUR OWN POK MON CARD - I gave each guest a blank white 3x5 card and brought pens, pencils, crayons etc. to the table. They each had to make up a Pokemon, draw it on the card and come up with a name, HP (health points, how much power it has), what type it was, the attacks, etc.  Later on, with the cards displayed on the wall, we voted for Coolest Name, Best Drawing and Best New Pokemon.  The winners each got a large candy bar.  This was a hit, but the voting took a long time and two kids who didn't get any votes got their feelings hurt. If I had to do it over, I'd give prizes without voting or skip the prizes altogether. 

As kids finished their cards, they moved to another room for a COIN TOSS  I put three paper plates on the floor (the Pokemon ones I bought from OTC) and had the kids line up behind one of 4 birthday presents on the floor, each present about 3 feet away from the plates. (Four people could play at once.) The kids on team Diamond each got 9 dimes and the kids on Team Pearl each got 9 pennies to toss, trying to get the coins to land on a plate.  At the end, the team with the most coins on plates won a prize.  At first the kids scoffed, saying how easy it would be, but out of 126 coins only 16 landed on plates. 

Then we headed to the garage (the biggest space we had) for a RELAY RACE - The teams lined up behind big baskets.  On my go, two people from each team ran to the other end of the garage and took a balloon out of a box. While standing on the carpet that the box was sitting on, they had to press the balloon in between their bodies (worked best to smoosh it between their bellies) and carry it back to their team without dropping it or touching it with their hands.  If they did, or if the balloon did not make it into their team's basket, they had to return the balloon to the box and go to the end of their line. Play continued until all the balloons were gone.  The team with the most balloons won a prize. 

They loved this!  (I was going to play Electrike Relay, as described by someone on this site, but we tried it before the party and couldn't get the balloons to stick to our heads with static electricity, so I switched the game up.  Note: Make sure you have an odd number of balloons or are prepared to award both teams in case of a tie.)  Then we went back inside for cake and drinks. 

CAKE SURPRISE PRIZE  After we sang happy birthday, they kids looked on the bottom of their plates and the one with the picture of Ash, Brock and Misty won a big candy bar.  The drinks were Jigglypuff Juice (pink lemonade - Jigglypuff is pink), Regice Rootbeer (rootbeer floats with vanilla ice cream  Regice is an ice-type) and Chimchar Chocolate (hot chocolate  Chimchar is a fire-type.) I made a drink menu with pictures of the corresponding Pokemon and had my husband take drink orders before the relay race. When it was time for cake, the drinks were ready. 

While they were eating cake, I stuck a sticker of a Pokemon on each person's back and we played WHAT KIND OF POK MON ARE YOU? While the song of the same name played in the background. This was a guess who game where the kids asked each other and us yes or no questions to figure out who they were.  I made the stickers by printing one of the bingo sheets on label paper.  Then I had the same bingo sheet printed and hung up for reference. There are hundreds of Pokemon, so it made the game easier to know that yours was one of 24 on a poster.  As the kids guessed correctly, they each got a prize.

Then they took a guess at how many gummy worms were in a jar in GUESS HOW MANY CATERPIES ARE IN THE JAR.  I made a label on white paper and taped it to the jar with clear packing tape. On it were pictures of Caterpie (who looks like a caterpillar.)  The kids wrote their guesses on a sheet of red paper and the kid with the closest guess won the jar. 

Our last game was the most fun. It's a variation on musical chairs and a game called Do You Love Your Neighbor" which I used to play at camp when I was a kid.  We called it DO YOU LOVE YOUR TRAINER?  I set up 13 chairs in a big circle and all but one person took a seat. The kid left without a chair was Pikachu and stood in the middle of the circle. The kids sitting down asked Pikachu do you love your trainer? Pikachu answered Yes except everyone wearing green or Yes except everyone who's 9 years old or Yes except the girls etc. The kids who matched the description had to get up and find a new chair while Pikachu tried to take one of the vacated seats. The person left standing was the new Pikachu.  If Pikachu said No! then everyone raced to find a new seat.  We played for about 15 minutes or so but the kids wanted to play longer. This was a crowd favorite. There were no winners or losers.  Then we opened gifts and I passed out the remaining favors.

The last activity was THE TRADING ZONE  We gave the kids the cards they brought to the party and they camped out in the family room and traded cards with each other as parents began to arrive.  I had some Pokemon jigsaw puzzles available for the kids who didn't want to trade but they all got into it even the kids who didn't have Pokemon cards before coming to the party.  The more serious Pokemon fans really had fun trading. The party was scheduled to last 3 hours but we went about 15 minutes over. I made thank you notes with a picture of Ash surrounded by about 20 Pokemon and wrote underneath: Birthdays are more fun when you celebrate with friends Thanks for coming!  Though not the most elaborate it certainly was one of the most fun parties we've ever done  all the activities were a hit with everybody. And cleanup was a blast  literally.  We popped all the balloons in a big frenzy. Have fun planning your party!"