Gift bags for pre-teens

[FranksBobot]

Help!

We are planning on putting a gift bag for each child attending on their table to keep them occupied whilst waiting for food, during speeches and general boring parts.
Problem is despite having a pre-teen myself I am totally stuck for ideas to put in them.
The oldest ones will be 12 & 11 all owning their own mobiles which will most likely be glued to them.
Then it's 10, 9 & 8 years that I'm stuck on.
I'm wary of anything that could make a lot of mess as don't want to ruin potentially expensive / best clothing.

Please give any suggestions you can think of.
The littlest guests are all sorted!

That's a tough age. Mine would have been happy to draw at that age (and older) but maybe too unsophisticated for tech obsessed kids What about providing some nice paper/card and colouring things and ask each child to draw a special picture of your wedding day for you which you will collate and make into a book as a reminder of the day? If you give them a purpose they might be more encouraged and you could end up with a nice momento. Otherwise playing cards or those retro games like sticks that have now become fashionable again (or maybe that's just with the adults who remember than first time round!)

Tricky age! Maybe the whole fidgety toy trend is the route to go down? Fidget cubes, fidget spinners, tangle toys etc. Fairly cheap on amazon! At my brother’s wedding, all the kids/teens got a disposable camera and a wedding i spy sheet. Went down well with my teens! Also, you can never go wrong with sweets

When my dc were that age they didn't have phones etc. We used to take packets of Top Trumps everywhere with us as the dc would play those for hours.

Thanks for the suggestions, I did consider disposable cameras but didn't think they'd be of much use to the older ones. The middle lot may appreciate them though.

I liked the fidget idea so have ordered a few cubes and also a couple of cats cradles (may have ordered an extra for myself!)

I did bags for a range of kids at my wedding aged from 1-12. The older children received age appropriate colouring books, packet of Twistable Crayola, and 3 varying retro wooden toys (from The Works), as well as a few non messy sweets and punching balloons.

Honestly though, they mostly played with their phones anyway

The biggest hit at our wedding with the kids was having their own room to hang out in while the adults ate - it was an upstairs bedroom in a castle we had hired for the day.

Unfortunately no upstairs room in a castle so they'll have to make do with activity bags!

I've picked up some metal puzzle things in the works today hopefully they'll keep them busy for 10 minutes.

You used to be able to get mini mindful colouring books from Ikea - I've seen them used in classes of that age.

You could also do a wedding scavenger hunt? Lots of ideas on Pinterest etc.