First time doing a party, does this sound ok?

[slowlygoingbonkers]

Dd will be 8. We are hiring a bouncy castle for her and 7 others. We was thinking of buying plain white party boxes and a load of stickers etc and letting them decorate them and serving the food in them rather than doing platters of food. The party will be from 3 til 5. Should I do any more activities?

You could get some plain mugs or bowls and some ceramic pens and have them available for anyone wanting a break to decorate/ if it gets a bit crowded. You can then just set them in oven while they eat their food. It then can double as a 'party bag', put sweets or marshmallows + chocolate (for hot chocolate) - as long as are cool enough.

When we have had a bouncy castle we have also had a craft table at one side and music playing too - oh, and lots of balloons. The big chunky bubble wrap (garden centres sell it) is fun to lay on the floor too.

Thanks, the mug idea sounds great.
The bubble wrap is ingenious.

Decorating cupcakes / biscuits works well too. Couple of colours of icing (or just some white) and sprinkles, choc buttons, coloured laces, other sweets etc etc. (And if you put them on a cake stand, with candles on one that your DD made, at the top, they make an impressive birthday cake.)

Ceramic pens take 90mins to bake, then need to cool off in the oven. A great idea, but don't expect them to be ready to take home on the day.

Pass the parcel, with forfeits / dares works well.

Any crafts / games that your DD would like? They'll be quite happy with bouncy castle and just being giggly together for 2 hours, but if you want any more crafts (mine LOVE crafts) Baker Ross do some good kits.

Have fun!

Now you mention it, I think we took them home with instructions on how to bake them at home, they were dry enough to transport, but you had to bake them so the decoration didn't come off. We did forfeits in pass the parcel for the first time for dd1's 7th birthday, and they loved it, more fun than the predictable one sweet per child. Sweets were given out when the task was completed.

Erm what are forfeits?
We only had sweets when we was kids and the girls have only ever been to soft play parties.

A forfeit is where say you open a layer and instead of a sweet, out falls a piece of paper which says something like 'sing a song', name 5 European countries, count to 10 in French (if they do French at school - I checked with dd first that her friends could), tell a joke, colours of the rainbow, etc. They then do the forfeit, and get a sweet.