INVITATIONS
- Use vacation postcards featuring a South Pacific beach. Write, "Wish You Were
Here!" on the photo side of the postcard-then print the party details on the back.
Mail to your guests.
- Create your own airline tickets, good for a free trip to your tropical paradise.
Write the party details on the ticket to read as destination, time of departure and
arrival, and other party information.
- Create a brochure, writing the party information as an advertisement for a
tropical paradise.
COSTUMES
- Ask the guests to come as hula dancers. King Kamehameha, bathing beauties, or
even tacky tourists, complete with loud Hawaiian print shirts, straw hats, sunglasses,
and cameras.
- When your guests arrive, dress them up with grass skirts made from sheets of
crepe paper.
- Ask your guests to bring bathing suits to the party.
DECORATIONS
- Turn your yard into a tropical paradise with crepe paper streamers, torches or
holiday lights, and big pictures of colorful fish and marine life.
- Hang up posters of tropical islands.
- Decorate the table with postcards of various beaches.
- Make a sandbox and fill it with sand toys.
- Fill a kiddy pool with water for a splash in the "ocean."
- Cut out palm trees from large sheets of construction paper and tack them to the fence.
GAMES
- Find Pirate's Treasure. Bury some toys in the sand and let the kids dig them out.
When they find a toy, they get to keep it, but they must drop out of the digging
and allow other players to find the treasures.
- Play Musical Pools. Set large pans of water in a circle, enough for all but one
player. Play a ukulele as the kids, in bathing suits, march around the pools of
water. When you stop playing the music, the kids must scramble for a pool and sit
down. The player who does not find a pool is out of the game. Remove one pan of
water and continue playing until only one player remains.
- Have a Limbo Contest and see how low they can go. Hold a broomstick or bamboo
stick four feet above the ground and have the players try to duck under it by
bending backwards. Play some music as the line limbos under the limbo stick. After
everyone has had a turn going under the stick, lower it half a foot and go again.
Keep playing until only one player remains. The remaining player gets a prize.
- Get out a Hula-Hoop and have a contest to see how long each player can keep
the hoop in the air. Try this game while wearing grass skirts. Younger kids may have
some trouble keeping the hoop in the air for any length of time, so have them jump
through the hoops instead.
ACTIVITIES
- Give the kids coconuts and let them make funny faces out of the coconuts. Point
out the two dark circles that form the coconut "eyes," then give the kids puffy paints,
regular paints, or felt-tip pens to create crazy coconut heads. When they're finished,
hammer a large nail into the top of each coconut, insert a straw into each hole, and
let the kids drink the coconut milk.
- Make LifeSaver candy leis by letting the kids string together LifeSaver candies
to form necklaces. Or have the kids make leis out of cellophane-wrapped candies by
tying them together with a ribbon.
- Teach the hula and put on a show!
FOOD
- Have a Hawaiian luau with lots of tropical food, such as fruit salad, fruit
kebabs, bananas dipped in marshmal-low and coconut, kiwi slices, pineapple wedges
on toothpicks with cherries on top, watermelon balls served in a carved watermelon
shell, scooped-out oranges filled with sherbet, and so on.
- Make a watermelon basket by cutting a watermelon in half lengthwise, using a
zigzag cut. Open the watermelon halves and scoop out the insides to make two bowls.
Fill the bowls with a variety of fruit, including the scooped out watermelon.
- Make pineapple boats by slicing a pineapple in half lengthwise, removing the
pineapple inside, and refilling with pineapple chunks, cherries, raisins, and
coconut.
- Serve Kid Kabobs by skewering cubes of ham, cheese, pineapple, and cherries on
wooden skewers. Let them wash it all down with Hawaiian Punch!
HAWAIIAN ISLAND CAKE
- Bake a rectangular cake; cool.
- Cover half the cake with white frosting tinted blue, to look tike the sea.
- Cover the other half of the cake with white frosting and sprinkle brown sugar
on the top to look like sand.
- Set toy Hawaiian dancers on the sand and have a tiny shark coming up out of the ocean.
- Use candles as tiki torches.
FAVORS
- Send the kids home from their Hawaiian vacation with sand toys, sunglasses, and beach towels.
- Give the kids grass skirts and Hula-Hoops.
- Let the kids wear their candy leis home.
VARIATIONS
- Have your Hawaiian Luau at the bearch!
- Invite real hula dancers to entertain the kids.
HELPFUL HINTS
- If you have water at the party, be sure to watch over small kids and nonswimmers.
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