INVITATIONS
- Buy or make blank recipe cards for your guests. Write down the recipe for a
special treat on one side, and the party details on the other side (phrase the
party details to read like a recipe). Then send the recipe card, along with the
special treat (the one for which you wrote the recipe), to your guests.
- Send small cooking utensils along with the invitations, and ask your guests
to bring them back to the party.
COSTUMES
- Ask the kids to come dressed as chefs, or provide large white men's shirts for
your guests. You can find inexpensive shirts at thrift stores.
- Make big fluffy chef's hats out of white or colored crepe paper. First make a
headband from the crepe paper. Cut out a big circle from crepe paper and puff it
out in the middle. Wrap the headband around the outside bottom of the pouf, and
staple or glue the pouf and the band together. Place the hats on the chef's heads
as they arrive.
DECORATIONS
- Decorate the party room to look like a special restaurant. Include menus, a
fancy tablecloth, your best silverware, and other special touches.
- Decorate the kitchen with lots of cooking supplies tied with ribbons.
- Put up pictures of food, set out a variety of cookbooks, and group ingredients
together for a game to be played later.
GAMES
- Set collections of ingredients together, one collection for several teams of two
to three kids. For example, you may have pizza ingredients on the counter, cookie
ingredients near the stove, and omelet supplies by the sink. Have the kids move from
station to station, and try to guess what the ingredients will make.
- Play the Food-Tasting Game. Blindfold the kids: serve them a food you have
cooked before the party, and have them guess what the food is. Then reveal the
treat.
- Play Name That Ingredient. Have the kids taste a new food and guess the
ingredients. Put something unusual in your recipe to make guessing a challenge,
such as a banana in peanut butter cookies.
ACTIVITIES
- Divide the kids into small groups, and have each group create a new food with
ingredients you provided. For example, you may give one group the ingredients for
chocolate chip cookies, but add several optional ingredients, such as seeds, dried
fruit, coconut, and so on, so the kids can be creative.
- After the groups create their food masterpieces, let them name their treats.
Then have a taste test to determine which creation tastes yummiest, strangest,
most creative, and so on.
FOOD
- Eat what you cook! Make mini-pizzas from English muffins, macaroni and cheese
with unusual noodles, do-it-yourself tacos, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies,
two-flavor ice-cream pie, kitchen-sink trail mix, confetti pasta salad with
colorful cut-up vegetables, or salt-water taffy.
FAVORS
- Send the kids home with recipes of the foods you've made at the party, so they
can cook the same foods at home.
- Give your guests kids' cookbooks, such as Kids' Party Cookbook or Kids Are
Cookin'.
- Offer the kids a special food treat.
- Give the kids their own special cooking utensil, such as a turkey baster filled
with candy, a ladle filled with nuts, or an egg whip filled with cotton candy.
VARIATIONS
- Take the kids to a cooking school and let them see the experts at work.
- Ask a local restaurant for a behind-the-scenes took at the kitchen, then
stay for lunch or dinner.
HELPFUL HINTS
- Check with parents to see if any kids have food allergies. Make sure to avoid
those foods.
- Have the kids wear aprons-cooking can get messy.
- Keep the recipes quick and easy, and make recipe cards enlarged and illustrated,
so they are easy to follow.
|