Birthday party ideas

[truflets]

Dd's 9th birthday is coming up and she is having a few friends over. Any ideas for easy, fun activities to keep them entertained for an hour or so?

If it's just an hour mine would probably prefer to hang out showing their new stuff with music and food. Make life easy for yourself

If that's not an option then I'd say baking and decorating cakes/biscuits - even ready made ones, decorating white t-shirts with fabric pens, maybe a home made photo booth?

My DD and her friends just loved being left with loads of craft stuff at that age.

leave them to their own devices if it's only an hour...

But if you must entertain them, get them to make pizza or something

Buy some fabric pens, fabric glue, plain white T-shirts, ribbons and off-cuts for T-shirt decorating.
Play Twister
Treasure hunt.
Play the smarties game: Give each child two small bowls and a straw. Fill one of the bowls with small sweets like Skittles or Smarties and leave the other one empty. On the count of three, they must suck the sweets onto the end of their straw, and transfer them to the other bowl. You can either put a time limit on the game, whereby they get to keep all the sweets they have transferred when the timer stops, or you could have a race to see who empties their bowl the fastest.
Doughnut on a string: another eating with no hands race, this time with doughnuts hanging on a piece of string!
Get a ball of string or wool and some tape and head and create a Mission Impossible style maze and the aim is to make their way from one end of the room to the other without touching the string. Google ‘string maze’ to see what I mean.
Hama bead keyrings
Friendship bracelets

We've had success with:
Decorate plant pots , ceramic pens, glue/glitter and temporary tattoos which they then spent the rest of the party decorating themselves with.
Silly party games like pin the tail on etc
Craft.