The Bear turned 7 in early March.
[before you ask…yes, I forgot to press publish on this post 2 months ago. it happens. moving on…]
We celebrated her seven-ness by throwing a kid’s party. The 1st ever. Not in the history of all things, just in our timeline. It had a theme – Science – and yeah, she’s a girl. Go figure. Heavens-to-Betsy, not a princess purse or bedazzled crown in sight! The girls (and a lone boy) even roughhoused in the backyard. The revolution starts here, people.
Quick background: I’d previously penned this kid’s birthday party idea article. It was comprehensive, sorta, but was definitely slanted to out-of-home parties which was strange because we still have never ventured down that particular road.
Here’s one I didn’t think of then, an idea who’s time had come for us: Science Experiment Party!
This is a quick rundown of what we did during the 3-hour shindig after raiding Amazon.com and the Steve Spangler Science Online Store. I’m going to use the classic, not at all confusing exclamation point scale which goes as follows: ! = meh, !! = neat, !!! = super cool, !!!! = mind-blowing. Got all that? Good.
- Slime – !!
- Insta-Snow – !!!
- Shrinky Dinks – !
- Diet Coke & Mentos explosion – !
- Color Changing Milk – !!!
- Magic Sand – !!!
At the last minute (literally 30 minutes before kids starting showing up) we decided to waste spend some money on dry ice. We thought it’d be cool to have some by the front door and on the table during the experimentation. And it was. For about 45 seconds. After that it was just a pain in the ass to refill and keep the smoke going. The kids lost interest and I lost the desire to maintain it all.
The kid’s goodies bags were stuffed with Pop Rocks (dunno why, just seemed to make sense at the time) and takeaways from the Slime, Snow and Magic Sand experiments. But oh, we didn’t stop there! The Mrs. printed instructions for everything we did for each child, rolled the papers up into a scroll and tied ’em with ribbon. I chipped in with the brilliant idea to make certificates of achievement (free from here, template #2) for every kid with the distinguished Dr. in front of their name. The Mrs. crinkle-cut the papers then glued ’em onto black construction paper. Classy move. The Mrs. rules. I presented the certificates to each child at the end of the party – all formal like. Really a great ending to an outstanding event.
*This post was not sponsored by Steve Spangler Science…but it should’ve been.
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