Ideas for 5th Birthday Party

[DockOTheBay]

Hi everyone, I'm looking for ideas for my daughters 5th birthday please. There will be 8 of them and we are having it at home.

I was thinking of games like musical statues, pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey. Maybe play in the garden if weather is nice. I know my daughter will love this but am a bit concerned that this won't be as "exciting" as big soft play parties or magicians that others have - would your 4/5 year old enjoy this?

Those won't fill 90 minutes so does anyone have other suggestions? The last half hour will be party lunch. Party bags will be a cupcake, sweets and a small toy or bubbles - any suggestions very welcome!

Thanks in advance

My nearly 5 year old would love this! To be honest I think it's a shame that parties are all big, noisy, village hall events with hired in entertainers.

DD will have to have her party in the village hall just because my house is tiny and she absolutely has to invite 14 children (as she's in a small class we have to invite everyone really) but if I had space at home I would do exactly what you're describing.

I would have a crafty activity lined up. It gives a bit of calm down time. Either buy some Baker Ross kits to make something or other (just google and you'll see what I mean) or an idea I stole from a friend and did for DD last year was to cut out some robots from A4 card and then have loads of stickers and self-adhesive googly eyes to stick on to decorate them (you could do the same with dinosaurs, unicorns, anything really!).

Craft of some type. You could also do a photo shoot and hand out cupcakes. Or a nice kid friendly film and games too. For the lunch, you could have sausage rolls, fruit platters and so on.

This sounds fantastic. Maybe a few more games, with cheap prizes to make it exciting.
You could add Teddy bear making if your budget stretches to it. Look at the smaller bears for this age if you're interested.
Look up bemybear. We've had a few of their parties.

A lot of it will be just them running around having fun so no need to plan for every minute. Plus giving time to eat etc.

This sounds exactly like what we did for my daughter's 5th party last year. She honestly LOVED it. We started with a simple craft (decorating masks), then did some classic games, paused halfway for a little picnic box style food, few more games, cake, dancing until collection time. Two hours flew by. We contained it in one room, pushed furniture back to create a space and hung streamers around. It didn't cost much at all, and I can honestly say that everyone had a really fun time.

Thank you for your ideas :)
Craft is a good idea. It's loosely an under the sea theme and I see that baker ross do sea life foam stickers so those might be good - they could decorate the blue paper party bags, or just pieces of blue card. And I'm definitely going to print out some colouring pages.

I hadn't thought of prizes for the games (except pass the parcel). Will they get upset if they don't win or are most kids OK with that sort of thing?

Teddy bear making sounds so cute, I will definitely look that up!

If you wanted to do prizes you could even just give out mini packs of sweets to keep it simple! I'd say at the age try to get each of them at least to win one thing.
Or you could buy cheap fidget Toys off Shein if you've time for shipping (around 2 weeks) or even from pounds shops.
Best of luck with it all! 🥳 🎉 🪅

Great theme btw!
There might be a few ideas here if you are looking for more:
kidactivities.net/ocean-theme-activities-page-1/

I'd say that I'd engineer everyone winning a little prize. Ours cost £1 each, but they were just happy to win something! I did the games in an order that the last couple could be fixed, ie pin the tail on the donkey first as we can't fix that, a dancing competition last as that's easy to announce whoever is still not a winner!

Under the sea theme sounds great...

You could do:
Pin the tail on the mermaid
Musical Jellyfish
The newspaper game where you take away a piece at a time but instead of pieces of newspaper they could be underwater themed items like a seahorse, dolphin, seaweed, shell etc
Definitely under the sea craft - sand art is nice
They could do cupcake decorating with sea themed toppers
Pass the parcel with music from Nemo/Little mermaid

I miss doing little kids parties!

You miss them!?

I'm not a natural at things like this and I'm wishing the party phase away and looking forward to DD being the age where she can choose a couple of friends to come to a theme park or similar for the day!

We just had my daughter's 5th birthday and did a party at home. We pushed all the furniture to the edge of the living room, filled the room with balloons, put on some music and bought one of those plug in disco lights and that genuinely took up the first hour with them running round/dancing. Then stopped for some party food, took up another half hour by the time they'd all eaten, then a quick game of pass the parcel, birthday cake and singing happy birthday, handing out party bags and it was practically time for their parents to collect them. Two hours flew by. As we had the music if I'd needed to fill more time I'd have done musical statues and handed out some mini chocolates as I had them left over from making up the pass the parcel but I genuinely didn't need to.

DD had a brilliant time and a couple of parents mentioned their DC had told them it was really fun so I'd say it was a success.

Oh and for party bags we did:

Slice of birthday cake
Stickers
Notepad
Little pack of crayons
Small packet of sweets
Sachet of hot chocolate
Wildflower seeds

Face painting! Even if it’s just a little glittery star on the cheek

Thanks for the great ideas! We have a playroom so I was going to take all the furniture out of there and anything small/breakable so we will have plenty of room.
I love the face paint idea, will definitely do that!

Stars, hearts and flowers, super easy and they’ll be delighted
Have a lovely party, they’re only 5 once!

@CrackerGal

This sounds fantastic. Maybe a few more games, with cheap prizes to make it exciting. You could add Teddy bear making if your budget stretches to it. Look at the smaller bears for this age if you're interested. Look up bemybear. We've had a few of their parties.

I was going to suggest exactly this. We had a bemybear “party” for my sons 5th bday, and they decorated the little T-shirts. The toy was then the party bag. It was so cute. We did need a few adults on hand to help - I had a couple of family members and a few parents stayed (I knew them well enough to check!). 6 years later and I know lots of the kids still have the teddies around! They were the little ones.

Other ideas - a craft table with just colouring etc.
And I hugely recommend “musical funny faces” stop the music and the kid pulling the funniest face “wins” that round. No one goes out so reduces chance of tears, and you can totally fix it so everyone wins the odd round.

If you do little prizes, then make sure they have a named bag to put them in as they go. Or they’ll lose them and then get cross!

Also - get those sucky top water bottles or juice or whatever, and stick handwritten name labels on them so they know which one is their drink.

With bigger parties, I labelled all the children with their name labels too! Easier for crowd control and they seemed to like it

As general party feedback from my friends who have a small summer-born five year old, attending parties for his bigger classmates who are turning six: don't do piñatas. When it eventually bursts and sweets fall everywhere it's like the hunger games in the rush to collect them all up, there will be naturally unfair distribution and resulting tears.

Stick to games where you can control the distribution of prizes/sweets/who wins to keep it more or less fair!

Following as I am planning to do the same soon.

I though I would be doing a big 'hall' party, but last weekend she had two parties, one a huge hall affair and one a small one with 6 kids in someone's front room. They made crowns, did pin the horn on the unicorn, pass the parcle, musical statues, had some food and danced and played for a bit. That was it, but she has decided to have a small party at home now as she prefered the small party so much more.

Now just got to get the invite list out of her. It changes daily!!

God, it'd be a cold day in hell before I tried to do a craft activity with eight 5 years olds.

I think what you have planned sounds fine OP. They'd happily spend the whole time just running wild I'm sure. My 4 yo loves dancing so I'd probably set up music and a disco light in one room but otherwise leave them to it 😂

I'd be a bit wary of giving prizes to winners at that age. Many 5 year olds have problems with not always winning. Maybe consider getting some stamp markers and award a different colour on the back of the hand. Something like this www.wilko.com/wilko-stamps-markers-8-pack/p/0252976?msclkid=e286a3c51221140c797cc1cf78e385ed&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PLA%3A%20Stationery%20%26%20Craft&utm_term=4577541788859648&utm_content=stationery%20
%26%20Craft&gclid=e286a3c51221140c797cc1cf78e385ed&gclsrc=3p.ds Another tip is to make pass the party bag the last activity and take the child holding the bag each time out of the circle to get coats on. Saves trying to get 7 coats sorted together.

Now just got to get the invite list out of her. It changes daily!!
@RenegadeMrs I had the same issue, she has 2 best friends who were consistently on the list and the rest kept changing. Eventually I sat down with the class list and got her to say "yes" or "no" to each name, then narrowed it down from there.