Kids Parties are a bit of a minefield these days. They are sooo expensive, the thought of hosting 20 plus kids if you are not super nanny is daunting to say the least!
I am lucky enough to have a July birthday to plan, so the open air is our stage!
One of our favourite things to do as a family is to go on woodland walks, so it was a natural thing to take the party to the woods.
There are some careful considerations to think about when planning a party.
Entertainment
At first I thought, we’ll just have a picnic and the kids will entertain themselves. But that is the first mistake of parties – don’t ever make that assumption as you will be disappointed and stressed!
So what will keep the littlies and the adults entertained for 2 hours?
Think of a theme – we went for bush craft.
I bought three tarpaulins and three bags of camping pegs from Poundland. I also bough a ball of garden string from Wilkos and took along some scissors. The kids had a great time making shelters and tents in the woodland. A friend also bought their proper shelter and the children helped to put that up. My dear husband helped with this bit.
After lunch, I handed out compasses and carabiner clips with a scavenger hunt sheet and sent them off with their adult to find all the different things. The Carabiner clips were instead of a party bag and I was very open with the children about them not having a party bag and I wasn’t asked a single time at the end, which made me happy!
Originally I thought I would hand out pencils too, but I forgot and then asked to bring back the items to me. Be careful what you put on your sheet, as you don’t really want them to bring back a mouse to your base camp! I found this online, and I used it because it is really pretty.
Once they got back from the hunt I put out some kebab sticks, a pot of grapes, a pot of peach chunk (I used tinned peaches) and a pot of marshmallows and the children had great fun making fruit kebabs. What I really wanted was to roast marshmallows, but you are not allowed to light fires in our woodlands! And then the children entertained themselves by playing in the tents and around in the woods.
Food
The easiest way to do the food, would be to ask everyone to bring their own picnic, but we really wanted provide lunch for all of our friends.
So we went to good old Morrison’s and used their pre order service. We spent about £50 on sandwiches, cookies, port pies, sausage rolls and it was more than enough for a total of 50 people. We also ordered a platter of kids sandwiches and they disappeared very quickly.
I used plastic table cloths to place all the food on.
For the drinks we bought bottles of water from Aldi and then I gave a sharpie for people to write their names on the label, so that they didn’t loose their bottle.
We also had birthday cake and cupcakes, which we handed out for dessert too. So people were very well fed.
And even in the woods, we were able to carry on the cake tradition, our LO really enjoyed lighting the candle and even cutting it up for everyone.
Location
We chose a local wood, and then we found a place in the woods that was in walking distance of the toilets and a cafe (for cups of tea).
SEND
We had a number of children who came with ASD or just a pure love of structure and routine, so I made a very simple picture time table and sent it out to the parents a day before. It just helped the children feel secure about what they were coming to, and amazingly we had no issues at all with any of the children, they felt really comfortable.
Invitations
I even went low effort with these too. I love painting, so I painted one postcard and then WhatsApp’d the image out to everyone. Individually not on a group (I hate WhatsApp groups).
In the grand scheme of things this wasn’t to difficult to plan.
What I really loved about it, was that we could invite as many people as we wanted. Last year we did soft play and could only have 15 children and this was difficult as there was a whole bunch of children we couldn’t invite.
If people cancelled at the last minute in a sense it didn’t matter as I haven’t paid out in advance for each person and then have that money wasted.
We could invite children of all ages. We had ages from 1 – 11 (children) and then we invited a load of our friends and because it was such a large area, we could invite children who find big groups difficult and they had opportunities to go off if they needed.
So all in all it was a great time!
Staying home Mum 