Last week I shared a post about the food we had at Arthur’s Gruffalo themed 7th birthday party, and today I’m going to talk about the activities, party bags and games we played along the theme too.

I’m not very good at staying calm around hyper-active kids, especially when I haven’t got any back-up grown ups present, so I decided to do a bit of a ‘craft party’ to try and minimise the crazy-small-people-running-around-like-small-whirlwinds content of the day.

With that in mind I took myself off to my favourite craft supply website, Baker Ross Ltd, and went on the hunt for things that could fit in with the party theme. After a bit of browsing I decided to go along with ‘woodland creatures’ as the base theme – expanding on the Gruffalo setting of The Deep Dark Wood.

I decided on three activities in the end:

Jump-Up Hedgehogs (£2.99 for 6)

Scratch-Art Frog Magnets (£2.99 for 10)

Colour-Your-Own Butterfly Jigsaw Puzzles (£2.50 for 8 or £9.28 for 32)

(At the time of writing, all these products are on offer and cheaper than the prices I have listed here!)

Before the party, I laid out the crafts ready for the party guests making sure they had all the pieces they needed for each activity.

Once everyone had arrived, I directed them all to the table and helped them to build their little hedgehogs. Super-easy to make as everything is pre-cut and sticky-backed, they pretty much managed it unaided aside from a couple of them needing help to get the backing off the fiddly little eyes. The hedgehogs kept them all amused for ages and caused great hilarity when they almost bounced into drinks and landed in people’s laps.

Those made, they all happily got on with the scratch-art and colouring in and it was relatively peaceful – with the odd burst of giggles at a bouncing hedgehog of course! We did raid my craft stash for extra googly eyes for the butterfly puzzles as well because any excuse to stick googly eyes on things is a good one! After about 45 minutes I brought in the food and their creations were put into freezer bags for them to take home (and finish off).

After food we moved through into the front room to play pass the parcel.

I really quite enjoyed making the parcel for this. The prize was a Gruffalo Memory Game and I didn’t want to wrap it all in proper wrapping paper but also didn’t have any newspaper to hand so I grabbed my trusty rolls of packing paper and got to work Gruffalo-ing them up!

 

I did the odd layer of wrapping paper between Gruffalo layers and put either a balloon or packet of sweets in each layer so everybody got something. It was quite cute as they all read out what was on the layers together each time they unwrapped it.

After this we played musical statues for a while and then they all decided as a group that they wanted to play Duck Duck Goose and organised themselves into a circle and played that until they’d had enough. Then it was just mad balloon time for fifteen minutes until it was time to go home.

As it was only a small party, I was able to put a little more in the party bags for the guests to take home (along with their freezer bags of crafts!) and I tried to work in the Gruffalo/Deep Dark Wood theme with them as well.

The party bags each contained a balloon, a small bottle of bubbles, a toy snake, a packet of seeds, a cone of pick ‘n’ mix sweets, some mini felt-tip pens and a mug with removable owl inserts they can decorate themselves as a keepsake. (Also from the Baker Ross website, £4.99 for 4 {also discounted at time of writing})

Everything seemed to go down well with all the kids and Arthur said it was an amazing party and that’s all that really matters in the end. I actually quite enjoyed picking out the activities and trying to find things to link in with the theme, even if I do find the whole party thing quite stressful.

Ah well, that’s done now until July when it’s Tori’s turn!!