Seasons Theme - My Favourite Party to Date

When Ollie said he wanted 'Seasons' as the theme for his seventh birthday party eight months before the big day I was pretty surprised. Not by the earliness of it, he has his mum's planning genes, just at the unusual idea. But he remained adamant over the following months and as we came up with more and more ideas it occurred to me that my son may be a party planner extraordinaire - there is SO much you can do with this theme!  And the benefit of him deciding so early was that I could collect bits for each season as we passed through them! I would really recommend this idea if you are looking to do something a bit different - I got so much positive feedback from the guests and their parents, plus it is such fun to plan! There are also lots of ideas below you could use for other types of parties such as an Easter or Christmas do, a Frozen or beach/tropical themed event. 

It was a joint party for Ollie & Phoebe so there were 40 children aged between three and seven. As the party took place before I had decided to start this blog my photos are mainly of the children having fun rather than the set-up, but hopefully you can get the gist!

’Tis the Season to Party!

The guests embraced the theme which was wonderful - we love a good fancy dress party but always state on the invite that it is optional, as not every child is as keen to don a cape and mask as my two are! We suggested on the invite that guests come dressed for their favourite season or wear one item from each season - I have not seen so many homemade costumes since I was a child, back in the days when your fancy dress box contained your parent’s old flares and smocks from the swinging sixties! Of course there was the odd Elsa (totally legitimate costume choice, she is the Queen of all things Winter after all) but we also had children with t-shirts covered in autumnal leaves, cloud hats made of cotton wool, raincoats paired with sunhats, homemade sunbeam headbands, summer surfers playing with halloween skeletons and the most Christmas jumpers I’ve ever seen pre-December. It was a visual treat! Our family were all going as 'Summer' in grass skirts and Haiwaiian necklaces but Phoebe ditched her grass skirt for an Autumnal Halloween costume at the last minute!

Decorations

We had already booked my son’s Beavers hut for the venue when I noticed on picking him up from Beavers that the whole floor was split into four coloured squares. This made it perfect to decorate although you could of course use the same idea without the colour coded floor! The blue square became an icy Winter wonderland - I had an old thin white curtain which I sewed some of our Christmas fairy lights to the back of and then stuck paper snowflakes to the front and hung it from the wall, it was really effective. The yellow square became a Summer beach - I put an inflatable palm tree (a few pounds from eBay) next to a small paddling pool (from the pound shop) and filled it with blue ballpit balls for the sea. I also put some flower garlands with paper lanterns along the wall to give it a tropical feel and put some large beach balls out (both items from a pound shop too) - the children loved throwing the balls around whilst waiting for the action to start. 

The green square became a Spring field and I made a Spring themed backdrop to hang on the wall using a roll of paper and then sticking on various coloured paper for blue sky, green hills etc. I used some EVA foam shapes from a pound shop to add tulips and butterflies. Finally the red-brown square was Autumn - I bought an Autumnal woodland photo backdrop to hang up (about £5 via eBay but has been used again since - it even hung in my son’s classroom for a few weeks whilst they were learning about Autumn!) and scattered craft leaves on the floor in front of it (a couple of pounds from eBay and have been used again at home for Autumn activities - I like to re-use as much as possible!)

A Seasons themed playlist helped to set the tone whilst children played and danced waiting for everyone to arrive - CBeebies seasons songs came in very handy for this as there isn’t many party songs about Autumn! It was definitely a Winter and Summer-heavy playlist! 

An Activity for Every Season

Once everyone had arrived I gathered the guests together and explained that they would be split into four groups - they had received a name sticker on arrival with a picture next to their name telling them which season they would be starting in - tulip, sun, brown leaf or snowflake. They would spend ten minutes doing that activity and then move clockwise to the next activity until they had done all four. The pre-assigned name stickers were helpful because I made sure that every guest was with at least one friend and that each group was about the same size, but I made a point of telling the children that this was only for one part of the party and they would have time to play with friends in the other groups later. Whilst I was doing this, my wonderful helpers (various relatives - see my blog ‘Things I have learnt about Party Planning’ for the importance of delegation!) were setting up their activity - they weren’t quite ready by the time I’d explained what we were doing so we spent a bit of time getting individual children to volunteer to stand up so the others could guess what season they were - I love how enthusiastic children get with activities like this!

They then split into their groups. Ollie was keen to have crafts but I thought four crafts would be too many for some children so we had two out of four. Here’s what we did:

Winter - Build a snowman 

I find that the key with crafts for a large number of children is to keep the base craft as quick as possible then provide lots of options for adding details once the item is built/made so that the children can spend as much or as little time as they want doing it. Therefore I cut a square of white cardboard for each child and stuck a large polystyrene ball to the centre of it prior to the party. Then all the child had to do to make a snowman shape was to (carefully! - we had an extra helper on this table) push a cocktail stick right into the top of the ball and then push a smaller polystyrene ball onto the rest of the stick. It was then up to them how they decorated it. There was brown pipe cleaners cut to size for arms &/or Olaf hair, orange pipe cleaners cut to size for noses, googly eyes, strips of different coloured felt for scarves, snowflake confetti to stick on the base or the snowman, lots of felt tip pens and glue sticks. They wrote their names on the base and took them home with their party bags. I loved seeing all the snowmen together and looking at the different ideas that children had come up with, and also how proud they were showing them to their parents when they were picked up. This activity was a definite hit! **Please note - this activity is not suitable for very small children who still put items in their mouths, as polystyrene doesn't show up on x-rays. An alternative for toddlers would be to use white play dough**

Summer - stand up butterfly or flower

I bought packs of EVA foam butterfly and flower shapes from a pound shop (yep I really love a pound shop when party planning!) thinking the children could decorate them in some way. Playing around with them at home I found if I cut two shapes halfway down the middle (one from each direction) they would slot together and stand up which added another dimension to the activity. I pre-cut the shapes and made sure I kept the top halves separate to the bottom halves as they would need one from each pile to enable them to slot together and then provided lots of stickers, sticky jewels and felt tip pens for them to get decorating! These went straight in their party bags afterwards so I didn’t get a photo of them unfortunately but there was a lovely array of colours and decoration ideas used - some children using one butterfly and one flower which produced a very original, if somewhat lopsided, piece of art! A couple of the boys did choose not to do this activity as they thought it was ‘too girly’ so depending on your audience you may want to have another shape option - sandcastle maybe? - but the vast majority joined in and enjoyed it!

Spring - obstacle course

The children loved this one! They took it in turns to complete the course and got a mini egg for finishing. They started by weaving around toy traffic cones which I had decorated with the little chicks you can buy to decorate Easter cakes. They then had to carry an ‘Easter egg’ (egg and spoon) to the Easter bunny and put it in his basket (a toy rabbit sat behind a bowl). Next, they picked up a baby bunny (small rabbit toy), took it through the rabbit warren (pop-up tunnel) and gave it to the mummy rabbit (large rabbit toy). Finally they had to feed the bags of food (bean bags) to the Spring animals (luckily we already had a bean bag throwing game with rabbits & chicks on but you could certainly make a similar game with buckets decorated with lambs etc and a few bean bags).  We had two helpers on this activity too - my sister lined up the children and kept them chatting and cheering on the others whilst my lovely niece ran around putting rabbits and eggs back ready for the next go.

Autumn - memory game

My husband ran this game and he was worried that it wouldn’t fill the ten minutes. But he spent so much time entertaining the kids and making them laugh, we were invariably waiting for him to finish!! This is a really easy one to set up - all you need is a large tray, a cloth to cover it and various Autumnal items that will fit on the tray - a brown leaf, conker, wooly hat/mitten, pine cone, little bonfire made of brown pipe cleaners (leftover from the snowmen!), picture of a firework to name a few. Let the child whose turn it is look at all the items, cover them up with the cloth, take one away and then the child must identify which item has been removed. Each child got a chocolate pumpkin when they finished their go. This is a great one for mixed ages as you can make it harder or easier to suit each child by using more or less items, removing more than one item or moving the items around beneath the cloth. You can also make it last as long as you need to by giving them as many turns each as you wish. This game can also be tailored to suit pretty much any theme - for examples pictures or figures of the characters if your theme is your child’s favourite TV programme/film.

Summer Picnic Party Tea

Whilst the guests were completing their final activity we laid several picnic blankets out in the middle of the floor and as they finished they got a picnic box and sealed drink and sat on a blanket with their friends to eat their ‘Summer picnic’. I prefer to do this than feed them at a table (plus it fitted the theme nicely!) - groups of friends can all sit together with no arguments over seats and they all have the same food and can eat what they want of it. Plus it’s a lot quicker to clean up! Once they had eaten they could go to the Summer beach for a candy floss for pudding. I had hired a candy floss cart whilst they’d had a special offer on and the kids absolutely loved this (as did some of the parents that had stayed!) There were lots of sticky hands & faces by the end of the party!

The Cakes

Time to sing Happy Birthday. For Phoebe's I made a Winter Wonderland, covering the cake in white butter icing to look like snow and then added various wintry figures on top such as Elsa, Olaf and a penguin. I made a pile of snowballs from white ready roll icing and put one each in Elsa & Olaf's hands.

Ollie's cake was a Summer beach with blue butter icing for the sea on one half and yellow ready roll icing on the other half for the sand. I put some Lego figures on top including one sitting under a cocktail umbrella 'parasol' plus some cake bunting from a pound shop that I added a paper sun to.

Party Games

We then had some party games until hometime. Corners was an obvious one to do with the four decorated corners - for those not familiar with this game, the party guests dance until the music stops and then run to a corner. Someone with their back turned shouts out the name of a corner and those stood in that corner are out of the game until there's only one winner left.

‘Frozen Statues’ was basically musical statues but “pretend you’ve been frozen by the Snow Queen”. 

We did have a couple of other ‘back up’ games but ran out of time, including a Seasons themed version of ‘Captain’s Coming’, where you have to remember the correct action for each order shouted out - “Winter!” = pretend to ice skate around the hall, “Spring!” = hop around like Spring bunnies, “Summer!” = pretend to swim around the hall, “Autumn!” = act like a scary Halloween creature.

Party bags

Their party bags contained a small item for each season which I got from Baker Ross, they had a great selection for this theme, plus of course the items they had made.

As I mentioned there are lots of ideas in this post that you could modify to suit any number of themes but I really would recommend 'Seasons', the children had so much fun. I would love to hear from you if you use this idea or if indeed you have organised any other unusual themes yourself!