4 Year Old Birthday Party Ideas - Aurora,IL

When my daughter turned 4, instead of having a pinata, we put some candy inside a bunch of balloons. The kids had to pop the balloons to get the candy out! The kids had a lot of fun with it.

My personal soap box is I hate goodie bags...drives me crazy that kids can't just go to a party to celebrate a birthday without receiving something in return.

A friend of mine got cookies from a local bakery. They said her sons name and maybe his age. They were about 2.50 a piece

I took old baby food jars filled them with m & ms and tied a balloon to it

Good Luck

If I am spending money on crafts or activities, I make it something the kids can take home as their "goodie bag". They can bead jewelry, stick foam letters on a can coozy, paint a little box, etc.

No need to buy both games/activities AND parting gifts. I agree with those who don't like the goodie bag idea. How did we get to the point of going to someone else's birthday party and expecting something cool to take home? I always talk to my kids about that when we're going to a party...nothing is worse than the kid waiting to go home and demanding his goodie bag. Rude!

Does your son like animals? We had a "dog" party once. We made collars (beads on a leather string), painted faces, made foam dog ears, ate out of dog dishes we decorated with jewels, and crawled around on the floor. Fun for any age and they had great reusable things to take home.

We just had a 5 year old b-day party at our house. It was for a girl, but many of the activities were gender neutral. Musical Chairs was a big hit. We also did cookie decorating and then that was their favor to take home. Another hit was "Pin the Princess in her Castle." You could substitute any picture and give each child a sticker to ask them to try to place it on the correct target while blindfolded.

We had lots of fun doing a treasure hunt at my son's party last week. I did have a goody bag, but it had a glow stick, some stickers, a bouncy ball and I few other non-food items in it. I don't like to give out candy (with my oldest being 14 I'm kind of jaded that way).

I had plain bags that they decorated when they got there so then their goody bag was unique (and pretty cheap since I used brown lunch bags).

I got some game ideas from here and got some books from the library. Some of the books were ancient, but the game ideas were still good!

The Dollar stores are perfect for this situation. You could get each child just one thing but wrap it up.

A friend did a treasure hunt type party where she took pictures of each 'clue' and then cut the photo up into 4-5 pieces. The kids had to put the puzzle of a photo back together to get the next clue and when they found the clue they got something for their goodie bag and the picture of the next clue.

Since the 4 year olds could not read, the photo clue was a great idea.

I'm wondering if I could use this for my 5 year old daughter's party but she wants to have 8-10 guests and I'm not sure that it will work very well with a bigger crowd.

For my 4 year old girl - it was a Cinderella party; for my son at that age, it was a mini carnival - with little games (i.e. bozo buckets, a water/cup relay, mini obstacle course, played limbo, musical chairs, hot potato, etc...) Oh... I forgot all the balloon games that we did, too. You could even do some kind of game with hot wheel cars - maybe a race! Scavenger hunts are a cute idea.

If you didn't want to do a traditional goodie bag, you could either do a big, fancy frosted sugar cookie, to fit the theme of the party, from a bakery or you can do yourself. Or, I noticed, the other day, that our dollar store carried "popcorn" printed bags. You could throw a microwave popcorn, theatre-size box of candy, small can (6 oz) pop in there.

Have fun!

WE just did our b'day party. We had couple of games and no goody bag:

1. Ice breaker: Cut the photo cards in Half. Give each guest an envolope of half. They have to find a match to win something fun.
2.Guess her growth..we had pic of my daughters face and ask guest to guess right seq. closest was winner.
3. WE did pass teh parcel..with each wrapper ..a nursery rhyme to sing.
4. WE did pictionory..(junior version) it was fun.
5. Make puzzle for kids above 3 and above 8 group
6. Blindfold kids and ask them to put crown on head.
7. Had all kids dress up as prince or princesses and gave them book. (scholistic book for 5 under and big disney book for over 5)--2.00 $ a piece.
8. then we had couple of 1 min games.. person with oldest penny wins, one with 100$ bill, Lowest 5 th number, who has sticker under chair.
9. we also had a petting zoo, where baby animals were there for kids..that was a blast success.

All the FUN!!

V.

We did a Fancy Nancy theme. It was fun, but more girl focused. The dollar store and resale can be a good place to look for goody bag stuff.

My friend is doing a Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory theme. Sounds like it will be fun.

Hello! I think a cookie decorating party would be a lot of fun for this age. You could bake sugar cookies for the kids to decorate and have a table made up specifically for the decorating (maybe some dollar store table clothes underneath). Have some miniature chocolate chips, sprinkles, some little red candies, things like that!

Also, here is another idea if you are creative enough to pull this off (unfortunately, I am not lol!)http://www.birthdaypartyideas.com/html/pirate_parties_75....
Another party idea is to have the children each make their own mini pizza's to eat. Make (or buy) the dough and have them already shaped and let each child "decorate" their own.

You could possibly have the children decorate and make their own goody bags with glitter, glue, washable paint, stickers, etc. And the nice part is that you can buy a lot of these things mentioned at the Dollar Store! It's a wonderful place for balloons, paper plates, cups, lots of things to decorate with (both the goody bags and for the party).

I hope I was able to help out in some way. Good luck and have fun!

What is your son into? When my son turned 4 he was into pirates, so we had a pirate party at home. We made a pirate ship cake all decorated with his pirate toys. I bought stuff from oriental trading - bandanas, temp tattoos, and some prizes. When all the kids came in, they were able to get a tattoo on, eye patch and bandana to get into the mood. I made pirate bingo boards on the computer, we played that. We played pirate buckets (bozo buckets), pin the eye patch on the pirate - we made it on a poster board ourselves. (wasn't too great, but they loved it), we played find the hidden rubber pirate duck, each got one and we played a ring toss game that was a self inflating pirate ship, bought for $20 at party city. He still plays with it a year later. I made all the invitations, on one side it was a treasure map to our house on the other was pirate lingo to invite. I found a lot of stuff just searching the internet. This year (next month) we are doing star wars and just looking at traditional games that we can change around to be part of the jedi training. So if he likes something, just google search "star wars party, 4 year old" and you'll get tons of suggestions.
Good Luck!