Penguin Winter Party

We are delaying my son's birthday party so we can have both of the boys celebrate together. I am sure it is not fair at 3 to do that to a kid that has been talking about his birthday party for 6 months already, so we had a penguin party/play date to pass the time. We had ten little kids over for crafts, games, food, and fun.

We started out with a few crafts. I copied a simple penguin image and mounted it on construction paper. The kids glued cotton balls on the penguins tummy and then colored their little guys. I forgot to take a picture when everyone was working on their projects, because I was so busy assisting them. This is my youngest making our craft.

Every child got a bag with a penguin stuffed animal and a book of their own. They all sat down on the penguin blanket, and opened up their treasures.

Then my sweet cousin Cassandra read Penguins, Penguins Everywhere by Bob Barner to them.

After storytime, I passed out trays and filled them with a big scoop of salt. I then handed out penguins, wooden trees, candy canes, red stones (gems), snowballs (marshmallows), and ponds (blue foam cut outs).

Here are the bags of snowballs! Most of them were eaten by those sneaky little boys.

The penguins ducked and dived through the snow. I think pretending with the penguins was their favorite part. These 2-4 year olds played with it for almost 20 minutes until I announced it was time for lunch.

I kept finding amazing penguin items on sale after Christmas for pennies, so the penguin party idea transpired. I took these adorable placemats from Target and wrote each kids name on the hat of the penguin. The kids also had penguin cups to drink out of for fun. Remember the bags I made last week (here)...I used those for lunch bags and had everything made up in advance. With ten little ones running around, it is hard to get them all lunch at the same time otherwise.

 I used baby food containers to put fruit in, and I taped a cute penguin image on top.

Then for desert we had deep sea fishing penguins. I found this precious idea at Cute as Fox.

I altered it just a little. I started by placing gummy fish in the bottom of my cups. I filled them with blue jello. I taped penguins at the lip of the cup, and stuck a toothpick through the paper for a fishing pole. The toothpicks stayed in place by themselves. I tied some white yarn on them for fishing line.

My clever husband suggested spraying whipped cream around the edges to leave a small amount of blue showing to represent deep sea fishing. It was a little too hectic at the party to try this, but I did later, and it was precious!