Wild Kratt's party

This is it, the end of a season for me.  My baby turned 5.  That means he goes to real school next year.  I don't think I know how to deal with that yet, so as with all things that are to hard I will put it off until I really need to address it.

Hunter, William, Brennen, Peter

  For Peter's birthday he really wanted to take people to Jump on it (a trampoline arena)  I originally thought that was a great idea, until I looked up how much it cost. In attempts to deter him from this idea I spat out all kinds of "cool" ideas., when I finally suggested a Wild Kratt's party his interest was piqued.Its important to understand children's attention span for activities.  For a 4-5 year old and hour and half is plenty of time for a party.  2 hours is really pushing it for this age.  I scheduled Peter's for 1 1/2 hours and it was perfect.

First order of business was to make "creature power suits"  these were really simple but a little time consuming.  I used felt and Velcro for the whole suit.  Felt it pretty cheap, so I bought black and just a little bit of blue and green. My local craft store also had Velcro in these colors so I picked some of that up as well.  

The vest was simple,  as you can see I used a paper bag as a template then folded my felt in half so I was cutting out 2 vests at a time.  Next I cut out the strips and circles. Before I sewed everything on I sewed a small square of Velcro on the large circle.  This is where we were going to attach the creature power disks.  When I sewed the large circle on I first sewed all around the circle to give it stability, THEN I sewed it on the vest leaving an opening in the top so they could store their creature power disks inside. I found a print off of the creature power disks online and then I just glued them to a cardboard circle and put a little quare of the pokie side of Velcro on it. I sewed the Velcro in strips on the side flaps (the soft side of Velcro on the front and the sticky side on the back flaps inside) then added the color strips on the side.  I did this so the kids could slip the vests over their head then wrap the flaps around and stick with the Velcro.  (This way it's size was adjustable.)  This was the party favor.  As a mom I hate those little trinkets and candies that kids come home with.  We usually just end up throwing them away the same day.  A lot of the parents were pleasantly surprised that the kids got to keep their vests and the kids were super stoked.

Sam

For games I came up with 5 creature powers.  The first was a beaver.  For this one we built beaver dams with pretzels and chocolate in my little fondue pot.  I did this one first so that kids could work on it while the others trickled in to the party.

Once everyone arrived and all the dams were done we headed outside for a Cheetah Chase.  I made cheetah tails with some fancy duct tape, just taped over itself. I did a couple of different variations of tag.  First was for everyone to try and steal others tails.  Another one was freeze tag, as well as regular tag.

After cheetah chase we learned about butterflies.  For those boys a little weary of butterflies I explained how amazing butterflies are.  They fly farther than any other animal (according to its size) etc.  the kids quickly got on board.  For the butterfly we got into teams of 2 and wrapped each other up in a chrysalis (toilet paper)  when it was time they got to break through and see how far they could fly.

Our 3rd creature power was the kangaroo.  And you guessed it, we had a hopping race.  I paired the kids up by size and let them go.  We also had them see how far they could jump with just one jump both feet together. After this one we needed to change things up so went inside to eat cake and open presents.  After I sugared them all up we went back outside to finish the games.  We had a scorpion  game which was a crawl on your belly race and lastly lizard hide and seek.  This was to demonstrate how well they could camouflage themselves.  this was a pretty fun party.  I like that the kids were all more than wiling to participate and, other than the vest was so simple to prepare for.  Happy Birthday my Peter Pie.