4 year old boy birthday party - PIRATES

[time4tea]

Will do a cake, outfits (stripey t-shirt, eye patch, hat, draw-on silly beard/moustache) any tips for games etc. am thinking about something with walking the plank, chocolate gold coin treasure... but surely someone has done something inspired before

will be just for a select 4 or 5 children...

X T4T

treasure hunt for the gold coins

oh yes , did it for ds' 5th. Had sandpit where we buried treasure and kids each planted flags to see who was nearest, Port , Starboard... if you have space, musical islands (we used place mats), Walk the Plank - drew a straight chalk line and blindfold/turned them, treasure hunt

Don't let them bring swords. I speak from experience.

lol - I put away ds1's arsenal of weaponary swords when we had his party.

Yes DS2's party last year was a pirate one.

This is what we did:
stick eye patch on giant pic of Johnny Depp (yum)
make pirate or parrot mask
Flap a fish in teams of 5 (we had 20 children)
Game where I drew a map and then marked it off in squares and told a story about a pirate bringing it to my door and an envelope with the location of the treasure they all had to pick a square - this was the only thing everybody did (actually that's a bit tricky for 4 children)
Treasure hunt for gold coins (chocolate or cardboard)

treasure map (with grid on ) to colour in and then place your X where you think the treasure is
nearest one gets a prize

pin the eye patch on the pirate (like pin the tail on the donkey, blindfold them first)

cake btw I did a pirate ship (extensive use of Playmobil for versimilitude) but my best ever cake was certainly the treasure chest I did the year before (not a pirate theme party! but anyway) - fill it with choc coins and sweetie necklaces, it looks soooooooooo fab.

We did quite a few that have already been mentioned plus Pin the eyepatch on the pirate, digging for gold (gold coins hidden in a box of sand), musical pirates (musical statues but doing a pirate pose).

I googled 'pirate parties' and got loads of good ideas from various sites.

We went to a pirate party last year. They did a pass the parcel variation, passing a plastic crocodile, and taking a prize from a treasure chest when the music stopped.

Franny you were clearly at my party (heavily disguised then...

)

oh islands would be good

get several sheets of newspaper and put music on for dancing. When music stops they have to jump on an island. Each time take a sheet or two away so the children have to share islands. Everyone must have at least one foot on the island. Take islands away until only one left, everyone must attempt to get on island or be eaten by sharks

Clary I think I have been on a couple of threads like this before! probably nicked all the ideas from those

I gave all the kids very floppy foam cutlesses to avoid injury and I was the horrible captain so they could only fight me! I think we've had 2 pirate parties, one was a craft party and we made a big cardboard ship and sailed it in the garden to a treasure island for a picnic. The other we did a treasure hunt, pin the eyepatch on the pirate, decorated pirate biscuits, made parrots (!)

thanks for all these... there's a great party theme website, but the descriptions are all in one big solid paragraph and refer to all kinds of weird american products, so I'd rather go with your ideas... MN always comes up trumps...

Ingles2, where did you get your foam cutlasses?

X thanks to all X

our cutlasses were really pathetic. My DH seems to think they were the free gift with a comic and we bought six!
I can't find one online as crap as ours but here's one
£3.50 you could give them instead of a party bag perhaps?
and I imagine ELC and GLTC do them as well.

we bought pirate party bag stuff from here ...
party pieces

We got the kids to make cutlasses - We cut out cutlass shapes from cardboard and got them to wrap the blade in tinfoil - went down really well.