Hobbies And Interests
Face Painting and Tag
By teaming up with other adults to pool clean T-shirts and water-soluble paints, a face painting party becomes fun for the kids and the parents. The face painting can provide a fair way to divide teams for a game of tag, so no child feels unwanted. For example, make the teams flowers versus animals or spots versus stripes.
Solar Oven Picnic Competition
A party where the kids get to make their own food guarantees an unusual messy party. By showing the kids how to make solar ovens out of pizza boxes, the party becomes a learning activity. The New Mexico Solar Energy Association website recommends using this project to teach children about solar energy and energy conservation. Add to the competition by giving prizes for the most artistic meal, fastest cooking, most unusual looking solar oven and strangest combination of ingredients. All this requires is a picnic tables with a variety of ingredients in dishes with serving spoons, rolls of aluminum or tinfoil, clean, empty pizza boxes and a sunny day. Having an example solar pizza oven made helps get the kids started. It only takes cutting the pizza box top to lift as a lid and lining the inside of the box with the shiny side of the foil facing in and the lid with shiny side facing out. Adding a sheet of black paper to the inside of the box on the bottom helps hold heat, and sealing the outside edges with plastic wrap keeps heat in. Dollar store prizes and fresh whole food ingredients such as tortillas, brown rice, shredded cheese and grated vegetables make this an inexpensive party.
Egg Toss Target Practice
Hosting a messy egg toss game goes smoothly by collecting out-of-date eggs from stores and other parents. Placing tarps over the fence and on the ground makes clean-up easy. Having the kids help make bulls-eye targets to hang on the fence gets them involved in the game. Giving prizes to kids who hit the bull's eyes gets the kids into the competition. Water balloons make an enjoyable game variation for hot weather. Adding water balloon slingshots gives the kids a chance to work on their aiming skills.
Toilet Paper Mummy Game
With a few rolls of inexpensive toilet paper, it is simple to get any group of kids laughing. The game involves dividing the kids into pairs. One kid on each team wraps the other up as a mummy in the toilet paper and the fastest mummy maker gets a prize. Letting the teams trade places gives all the kids a chance to win. Using a stopwatch determines the fastest mummy maker of the two groups. This game goes well with a Halloween or Ancient Egyptian theme.