Help, Ideas for 4 yrs old party in small house and limited numbers please

[Franniban]

I'm thinking about 5 4yrs olds and a couple of older kids, what games are good, in a small house, in January when we can;t go out side? Pass the pacel, but what else? Any ideas gratefully received.

You could maybe consider a theme and basing the games around that. When the dds were that sort of age we did things like:

• a puppet party (made wooden spoon puppets then performed a play with the puppet theatre)

• a Wizard Of Oz party - eg: pin the heart on the tinman, scarecrow musical bumps etc

• a tea party - put the cherry on the fairy cake, blind tasting of tea party food, eating chocolate with a knife and fork etc

• various others

we did a fairy one where they dressed up and made tiaras (from elc...about a pound each). played hide the silver key to the castle(my coming of age key...very old!) pass the parcel with fairy snap cards in the middle, pin the star on the fairy wand....oh and we put up a little tent in the hall and pretended it was in the fairy woods, they seemed to love it...

You could do a treasure hunt - hide things (eg lollipops) around the house in "easy" places for them to find.
(We did this outside in the summer for DS1's 4th birthday - in the hour between us putting them out and the children looking for them, two had been nibbled by some garden creature )

Thanks guys that's really helpful. I like the idea of a treasure hunt ideal and the Wizard of Oz, food for thought as they say