There isn’t one right way to plan a kid’s birthday party; every child is different, so every party should be too. Every party planner is different too. I like having a theme to plan towards, and luckily, my daughter is willing to work with that. Some years, deciding on the theme is a chore in itself, though her eleventh birthday was super easy to pick – that had to be Harry Potter themed. (I suspect her 111th birthday will have a Lord of the Rings theme, though I also suspect I won’t be available to celebrate it.)
Some themes only affect the party favors, such as the year we handed out crocheted dragons. The rabbit theme impacted the food too, I served carrot cake, along with the traditional banana bread mini-donuts that I’m required to make for every birthday party. Carrot cake happens to be my favorite cake, so I had actually suggested it for a couple years before the theme finally
Harry Potter had the most elaborate planning, with a home-made dementor piñata, a castle cake pan, and a lathe where kids could customize their own wooden wands during the party. There was even a golden snitch being hidden repeatedly; each time it was found, the house was awarded points, and it was hidden again. The planning started more than a year in advance, with bits and pieces coming together as we added the Hawaiian aspect (for a summer birthday) and came up with the different activities.
I don’t think you need many organized activities at a party – once they have an idea or two, kids will generally keep themselves entertained. And the adults can relax while they do that (except, of course, if you’re the adult supervising the lathe).
This year’s theme took a while to pick, we finally settled on a party at Brookfield Zoo, which is one of the two large zoos in the Chicagoland area. There are playgrounds for the younger kids, educational information for the bigger ones, and an awesome selection of animals for everybody to see.
I made good use of our zoo membership, visiting multiple times earlier in the summer so I could gather clues for a scavenger hunt. I took tons of photos of educations signs that I normally wouldn’t have, just so I could review the information at home while planning the hunt. Cassandra suggested having a word scramble from the answers, so I went with that idea. I briefly considered giving more clues than letters needed for the word scramble, then decided not to be that mean… this time.
As a bonus, I printed up Brookfield Zoo Bingo cards, so the teams worked together on the scavenger hunt and separately on their Bingo cards. The one downside we hit was the time limit – I told people to be back at our picnic area in an hour. Some of the Bingo cards were fairly thoroughly marked off, but in that time, only one person finished more than half the hunt; I included clues from opposite sides of the zoo. This one really takes two hours… try it, if you’d like. Brookfield Zoo Scavenger Hunt (Answers available on request.)