balechristianas: Artist Birthday Party for Kids and Preteens

Tuesday, 27 September 2011

Artist Birthday Party for Kids and Preteens | Suite101.com

: Provide Fun Craft Supplies for Birthday Party Fun - Photo by Susan Caplan McCarthy

Create a themed birthday party around the artist's palette with food and activities that will inspire a child that loves art.

For a child that loves drawing, painting, and creating, this party repeats the theme of an artist?s palette throughout the food, games, and crafts. You and your child can make invitations that look like a palette by cutting circles or splotches from different color paper and gluing them to a tan or brown oval. Include the information about the party on the front or back of this handmade invitation. Let parents know to dress their child in art-friendly clothing.

Birthday Party Snacks

Look for oval pieces of wood, found in many craft stores that will become your artist?s palettes from which you?ll serve a colorful assortment of food. These trays should be large enough to support at least six small plastic bowls. The bowls can be in a rainbow of colors, to complement the food, or they can be white or another neutral color. If you are concerned about the bowls moving over the tray, you can hot glue them in place or use double-stick foam tape.

On one tray, fill each bowl with color-specific jelly beans or chocolate color candies ? red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple; if desired, add brown and black. For more health-conscious treats, have other bowls on other palettes filled with fruits or vegetables cut into finger food.

Easy Meals for Kids

Allow kids to create pizza palettes for a heartier treat. Provide each child small pita breads and then allow them to add color to their artist?s palette with red sauce, white or orange cheese, red or yellow peppers, broccoli florets, and anything else that you?d like to provide.

Dessert can be another art project that kids can eat. Serve large sugar cookies and provide food coloring in small condiment cups. Give the party goers inexpensive new paintbrushes so they can paint pictures on their cookies before they eat them. You can do the same thing with a sheet cake covered in white frosting, but some children may find the frosting difficult to paint without scraping it off.

Party Games for Kids

Create a scavenger hunt for the room, your house, or your yard that sends kids in search of different colors or for specific items in a variety of colors.

Play a game of color Bingo. Give each child a Bingo grid and squares of colored paper that they can glue on in their desired pattern. Play the game by calling out, ?B-red,? or ?G-blue.?

Turn t-shirt decorating into a game by supplying each child with a white t-shirt and a fabric marker (give each child a different color marker). Kids start by drawing a scribble over the front of the shirt. Party goers then move one seat to the left and either color in one of the spaces created by the scribble or fills in the spot with a design or pattern. Keep kids moving around the table so by the end everyone had decorated everyone?s t-shirt. Play music while the kids draw and stop the music to move them along. Play the music for different lengths of time.

Birthday Party Favor Goodie Bags

Palettes of watercolor paints can be found at dollar stores. Package pony beads in a rainbow of colors and include enough string to turn the beads into a bracelet. Add in a pencil with a mini notebook to encourage art on the go.

Remember that you can purchase craft supplies, such as feathers and pompoms, and then break them into smaller gift bags. You?ll find more ideas at Craft Goodie Bags for Kids? Parties.

For more age-specific ideas, go to Arts and Crafts Party Ideas for Ages 4 ? 7 and Activities for a Craft Party for Ages 8 ? 11.

Susan Caplan - Susan Caplan McCarthy is a freelance writer, maker/crafter, environmental educator, solitary Eclectic Pagan, and belly dancer. She is ...