Small simple party for 3 year old DD - any ideas?

[Pennies]

I've got about 5 or 6 children coming (ages 18months - 4). Any ideas for entertaining them for a couple of hours?

I had about the smae number for dd's 3 rd birthday. They had a few pass the parcel games and did a bit of dancing. You could also leave some puzzles out for them to do.

pass the parcel, musical bumps and enough toys to play with.
Friend of mine hired large items like ride on cars etc from local toy library, which I thought was a good idea.
Keep it simple.

Face painting
Pass the Parcel
An extremely basic craft activity
Cake eating!

Girls or boys?

For girls, have a princess/fairy party - ask them to come dressed up and have them make crowns out of gold card and buy those stick-on jewels, they can spend hours decorating them. And make a princess tea with pink cakes etc. Clichéd but they adore it.

Boys and girls but can easily do fancy dress!

Thanks for these ideas - much appreciated.

kids this age still don't really get the pass the parcel thing. I'd just get some of your regular games and toys out - let them have a play - musical bumps and maybe a treasure hunt where they find stars or a picture of the birthday girl on a piece of card that they trade in for a little treat

Yellow Moon has lots of great craft activities for little ones. For dd2's 3rd b-day party (about 10 little girls and boys at our house) we decorated foam bags with letter foam shapes to spell their names so they made their own party bags, decorated little craft boxes with self-adhesive jewels, made party hats and they decorated fairy cupcakes (messy but they loved it). That lot lasted about 45 minutes. DH did some games - pass the parcel and musical bumps I think - then tea, then an egg hunt in the garden as it was near Easter. The good thing about the yellow moon stuff is that they basically create their own going home bag, so all you need to do is add in a piece of cake and a balloon and you're done (unless you live in an area that has gucci-prada-mega-mega-bags in which case this really won't cut the mustard!!).