Kids love beach themes.
Tiki- or luau-themed parties are perfect for summer birthdays or for adding warmth to a winter birthday. Decorate your home or backyard with palm fronds, serve beverages in half-coconuts (either plastic or real) and hang up comical wooden or plastic tiki masks. Cover walls or outline backyard property lines with brightly colored tropical tapestries and strings of flowers. You can also hand out leis for the boys and tropical silk flower hair clips for the girls as favors when everyone goes home. And to get everyone into the island party mood, there are many tiki-themed party games you can play both indoors and out.
Hula-Dancing
Hire a local hula instructor or get an instructional DVD, available at RealHula.com (see Resources). Use the DVD to learn some moves yourself and teach the kids. Allow the children to create their own dances and make up their own hula moves. Stand in a circle around each child as they combine or create steps and see who can keep up the best with each teacher.
Wet Sponge Dodgeball
This game is best played outdoors for summertime parties. Have all the guests wear bathing suits and get a bunch of very large sponges and some buckets of water. Divide the guests into two teams. Line up a few buckets on either side of your yard and ask the children to soak their sponges. On the count of three, tell them to throw their sponges at one another. Anyone who gets hit with a sponge must go to "jail" and can only be let out if someone catches a sponge and throws it to him. Let the kids steal players from each other this way. You can also create a no man's land where no one can enter to pick up extra sponges.
Island Travel
This game is ideal for outdoor, warm-weather parties. Cut out several large cardboard "islands." You can paint them with palm trees, tropical flowers, animals and surfboards. Place them in the yard several feet apart to make the jumping a challenge and get each child to hop from island to island without touching the ground in between. Arm the rest of the kids with water balloons, squirt guns or soaked sponges. If the hopping child lands on the ground, the other kids are allowed to get him wet until he reaches the next island, simulating a fall into the ocean. Let each child try at least once.
Tags: each child, their sponges, This game, with palm