Non-Girly 11yo Girl Sleepover Ideas?p

[TheHuntingOfTheSarky]

My DD1 is having 3 girls over soon for her 11th birthday sleepover. None of them is particularly girly (so no nail painting or makeovers) but they do all like gaming so I’m assuming that’ll be their main activity. However I’m starting to think I should be putting on some other kinds of fun for them, but I can’t think of anything! I asked DD but she wasn’t much help either 🙄.

I’m moving some sofas into our downstairs spare room and decorating it with fairy lights etc, have bought tons of sweets and drinks and will be ordering in pizza. They can have a film to watch but there don’t seem to be many age-appropriate new releases - Peter Rabbit is too young for example.

I’m at a loss as to what surprises I can conjure up. Please help me lovely Mumsnetters!!

Make your own pizza rather than ordering in? Have bases then loads of toppings so they can put their own together.

If you want you can then follow this with make your own ice cream sundae...

Are they young/silly 11 year olds (in a good way!) If so, maybe nerf guns?

I remember silly games like Twister / Jenga etc also being a big hit at that age once they'd all let their hair down a bit.

Play games: spin the knife and who it points to has to do a dare / truth or dare.

Make slime: pva glue, Almat (Aldi blue liquid clothes wash), shaving foam and colour dye/ paint (poster paint not acrylic). They will love making giant bubbles with it. My 14 yr old still loves it as do her friends. They can take it home as a momento.

Are they into Stranger Things? Seems fitting to watch some episodes as near Halloween.

What about something like Night at the Museum or even Grease?

Oh and how about getting some sparklers!!

Have they seen descendants 1 & 2 (though been out awhile)

Some kind of game eg one night ultimate werewolf

Karaoke?

The time will fly though I wouldn't stress too much

Ooh, Grease - yes their dance group did a medley last year but I’m not sure they’ve ever seen it.

Will ask about Descendants.

Sparklers are an excellent idea too!

One of the girls hates pizza so I don’t think we can do our own, she’d feel left out. But the ice creams sound great.

Thanks for all the ideas so far, definitely giving me food for thought!

For One Night Ultimate Werewolf would this be suitable for a couple of 7 year olds to join in? DD2 has a friend over to help balance things out a bit.

Re ultimate werewolf, sorry don't know, just heard it went down well with a bunch of 11yo

Get a garden size Jenga in living room, or a kids bow/arrow but with sucker on arrow and shoot the tail on the donkey, although pin the tail and spinning around also goes down well. Make mocktails. Midnight feast. Enjoy!

As long as I don’t have to have mock anything! We’ve never done a sleepover before - I will need a lot of 🍷🍷🍷

No... you get to make double strength full on cocktails!

How can anyone hate pizza? :-D

I don’t know!! But she has requested chicken nuggets instead 🙄.

Games like the chocolate game, flour and cherry game (Google if you're not familiar).
11 year olds I've know have loved these.

Just finished a Halloween party and served Chicken Goujons, Garlic Bread and Duck (spring) Rolls which went down a storm. The cakes and biscuits not so much.

Mini chocolate bars went down better than sweets/ lollipops too.

Lots of flavoured water in mini bottles - less chance of spillages.

If you can somehow get a picture of them all together before sleepover day, you can get it printed onto a t shirt or something and then they can decorate this with fabric pens.

I also always off "pick & mix" which just means I raid the confectionary aisle of any supermarket & get a random selection of sweets and chocolate and then put some/all (depending on size of bag & number of guests) of each in a bowl and the children pick what they want.

Buy plain white pillowcases and get them to decorate their own with fabric pens.

Save the file until about 10pm so they settle down and hopefully nod off watching it!

Fabric pens is a great idea, I bought a huge pack from Amazon as school was doing a book review T shirt thing. Haven’t used them since.

Chances of them nodding off before midnight are minimal - this particular quartet have had 3 previous sleepovers together and haven’t gone to sleep before 2am on any occasion!

Thankfully our spare room is in an extension so they can make as much noise as they like without disturbing my 7yo who is very grumpy when kept awake! We won’t make them go upstairs until we do at around midnight, by which time hopefully DD2 will be sound asleep 🤞🏻

Some of these ideas are really good! I have no idea what the chocolate game was.

I wasn't really into girly things either at 11, I think we spent most of the time on my trampoline doing gymnastics, playing Marco Polo in the pool, or doing very scary tricks off of the diving board. I lived in Florida at that time. My best friends and I were gymnastics maniacs. We drove my mother crazy I think.

There used to be a very good show on nickelodeon called are you afraid of the dark, and the episodes are on YouTube I think. Maybe for next time, you could even check YouTube. If they like gaming, I think there are quite a few good channels. Hopefully they are fast asleep now.

When mine used to have mass sleepovers, I always took them out for a late night walk with torches.
1 - they found the torches quite exciting
2 - burned off some energy Particularly as I included some very steep hills
3 - I saved the film for afterward so they would settle down In front of it.

Tbh, I was never that fussed how long they would stay up, the dc sleep on the top (loft) floor separate to us so I didn’t hear them, but they always really enjoyed it. Kids don’t really walk about in the dark much! Simple but effective.
Hope it went well

Oh sorry, it hasn’t taken place yet! Try and add in an after dark walk, about 9pm