Party Ideas: Animal Party for Kids ("Let's Party like an Animal!")
After more than a year without seeing most of our family and friends due to COVID-19, we decided that my daughter’s 5th birthday needed to be something to remember. As you’ve probably deduced by now (given that we’ve hosted both a “Barnyard Bash” AND a “County Fair” party in recent years), my daughter likes animals. A lot. Definitely more than she likes people, which I can totally understand, but I digress. That said, it really didn’t take long to decide on an animal party – specifically a BABY animal party (her words, not mine) – to celebrate us trying to come out of hibernation and rejoin the world of the living once again.
(Disclaimer: article may include affiliate links, which do not affect the price you pay.)
STEP ONE: STRATEGIZE ON THEME
I knew only one thing going into this party-planning endeavor: I wanted to spend as little money as possible. I also wanted to spend as little TIME as possible on the things I could control, which was why I went back to previous events I had planned and thought about what worked and what didn’t. I definitely wanted to replicate the idea of having 5 games for the kids to play because that would keep them busy and safer than if I just let them run wild on our downward-sloping hill in the woods. In a separate vein, I definitely DIDN’T want to serve shareable food because, well, COVID, which inevitably was going to be more expensive than family-style.
It had also become crystal-clear to me over the years that Dollar Tree is really the only place for someone like me when it comes to party-planning. No matter how cute the other plates and napkins being sold at other retailers may be, I just couldn’t justify spending 5 bucks on 20 paper plates that would likely all be used by the same person. This meant that it didn’t matter what our theme was – I was going to find something they had in the store and just make it work, even if it was just a solid color.
Fortunately – or unfortunately for me, since I’ve tried my hardest to steer her AWAY from this – my daughter is obsessed with pink, so that wasn’t hard to find. And after just one or two nights trolling Pinterest for “animal-themed birthday games and activities,” I was surprised at how much already existed out there, which made my life a whole lot easier.
STEP TWO: MAKE THE GAMES
Animal Party Game #1: Carrot Carry
The simplest party game of all time, in my opinion, is Pin the Tail on the Donkey. From my point of view, there’s literally no reason why it shouldn’t always be included at a children’s party – especially since it can be adapted in so many ways. In this case, I drew a bunny face across four pieces of printer paper and taped it to the back of an Amazon box. I found images of a carrot online and printed enough copies for the 16 kids we were expecting. After using packaging tape on both the board and the carrots to reinforce them against the siege of little hands, I wrote each guest’s name on each individual carrot in reverse age order to simplify the chaos on the day of. By doing this, you don’t need to keep track of whose carrot went where because it’s already written on it, and encasing both the carrot and board in packaging tape will keep them both durable and – most importantly – easy to pull off from other pieces. Due to COVID (and the fact that I honestly didn’t really care if the kids cheated or not), we just had each kid cover his/her own eyes instead of using a blindfold. The winner got 5 tickets, next-closest got 4, etc.
Animal Party Game #2: Purr-fect Pitch
Thanks to all my Instacart shopping, I had no trouble finding a wooden crate from Costco that would soon become the body for my cat. I found a photo of an enormous cat head and matching tail online, printed them both out, and taped the head to the front and the tail to the back. If you’ve got paint stirrers lying around, they make optimal reinforcements for the tail to prevent it from flapping over; otherwise, you can use a ruler, an empty tube of paper towels or anything that maintains some shape to it. Grab a ball of yarn from your local dollar store and have the kids throw it into the box from varying distances, depending on how hard you want to make it (for me, it was about simplicity, so the kids basically stood right in front of ours). We let each child throw three times, with the number they scored being the number of tickets they received.
Animal Party Game #3: Sheep Spin
Back when it was on sale, I had purchased a mini spinning wheel similar to this one at Oriental Trading, but truly, I think you can probably go through your board games closet and see if you have anything similar because that would totally work too. I used painter’s tape (packaging tape could probably work, but seemed a little harder to get off later on) and covered up each of the words pre-written on my wheel with numbers instead. Those numbers would ultimately correspond to the number of tickets each child would get once they spun the wheel. I printed out a picture of a friendly-looking sheep, stuck him in the middle with an arrow coming out of him, and bam, I was done.
Animal Party Game #4: Pick a Pony
I’m not sure where I first saw this game, but it is literally the coolest-looking thing I’ve come across. Grab a bag of tongue depressors and use a marker to color the very bottoms of each one in either yellow, blue or red. Yellow should have the most, as it will correspond to one ticket; blue gets two and red gets three. Print out a few different pony images online and cut them into squares; then either glue or tape them to the other side of the tongue depressors. Find some Styrofoam from an old shipping box (you can buy them at Michael’s or Joann Fabrics in the planting section, but it’s way better to get them for free) and fit it inside a box. Stick the tongue depressors inside so that their colors are hidden, and then have each child choose 3. Their total is however many tickets they get, though some kids seemed more excited at taking home the sticks themselves…
Animal Party Game #5: Doggie Darts
I took a page out of last year’s party book and recreated our dart balloons game on a larger scale. Two very important lessons that I learned here: first, I spaced them out way too much, which made them really hard to pop – if you do it, put them next to each other so they’re touching because that will make the game more fun since they’ll pop easier. And secondly, give yourself ample time to blow these up before the party – but keep in mind that they’ll deflate if you do it TOO far ahead of time. Personally, I’d recommend corralling about 4-5 other people about an hour before it starts so that everyone takes a few because I literally spent the first 20 minutes of the party locked in the guest room trying to finish this up. Regardless, though, tape a point value face-down (so nobody sees it through the balloons) on a corkboard and then tape a balloon over each one. I purchased this darts and balloons set on Amazon two years ago and absolutely love it, and while I was sure that you needed specific “dart balloons” for something like this, I added some regular balloons into the mix and they popped just fine too.
PRIZES
Take a corkboard and cover it in generic wrapping paper. Then just tape a bunch of stuff from the dollar store to it. At the end of the games, the children line up in order of most to least tickets, and that order determines who picks from the board first.
THE PINATA
Gone are the days of me paper macheing elaborate Ferris wheels over multiple weeks. Instead, I’ve become very fond of shirt boxes. They’re slightly less strong, but they also take SO much less effort that it’s worth the tradeoff to me. This particular one took a bit longer than some of my others because the shape of a 5 is inherently more difficult than other numbers, but I again got the design from a background image I found online that I liked, and just taped it all around (instructions and a link coming soon!). What’s cool about building one of these yourself is that you can control how big or small you make it, which was a problem I’d run into with the ones I’d find in the stores.
STEP THREE: HAVE FOOD/OTHER ENTERTAINMENT
We didn’t really try to theme our food choices this year, so we only had pizza and wraps for our guests. It worked out fine since the audience was mostly children, but many of the names we used at our farm-themed birthday party a few years ago – like “Pig Pen” for pulled pork and “Muddy Mac” for mac and cheese – could work for this one if you need ideas.
Our cake came from LaCascia’s, which has become my go-to spot for dessert these days, and a friend of mine made these incredible animal-themed cake pops that were the absolute cutest favors I’ve ever seen. You should check her out on Instagram at @asmaecharaf because she’s really good.
While I realize that having a traveling petting zoo is not for everyone, we were lucky to have found a great one – McDonny’s Traveling Farm out of New Hampshire – a few years ago and used them again. They brought baby bunnies, goats and chicks to play with and even gave pony rides!
We threw a bunch of giant waffle blocks that we already owned outside, along with my mother-in-law’s cornhole game for the adults. To be honest, I think a lot of them really enjoyed playing the dart game afterwards since there were still so many balloons left to pop after the kids had finished… but at the end of the day, it seemed like everyone had a nice time. Personally, I was most touched by the fact that all guests – even the kids! – kept their masks on despite being outside, which I really appreciated more than anything else because this whole reentering civilization thing is still foreign to me. But they did, and my daughter loved seeing her family and friends again, so I’m just grateful it went off without a hitch.
