Just Dance Party

My son wanted a Dance party for his 11^th birthday. The problem was coming up with a party that was fun, yet not too grown-up. I wanted it to be cool, but not like a high school dance party. We made sure to have games because the kids were still in elementary school. I invited 50 kids, and we had 25 that came to the party.

INVITATIONS: I wanted the invitations to be like VIP passes so I ordered lanyards and badge holders from ebay.  I created the invitations on scrapbook max, printed them at Walmart as 4 x 6 prints, them cut then in half and slipped them into the badge holders. My son handed them out at school. The kids loved them.

DECORATIONS: There were several things my son asked for: a disco ball, black lights, and a piñata. I chose to create a red carpet to make it look like a VIP Dance club and velvet ropes.

Lighting: We already own several black lights and my mom has several mini strobes that she uses in her class. We hung these up. We found the mirror ball on clearance at Taipan Trading after Christmas.  

 

 

Red Carpet: We used red gossamer and duct taped it to the ground. I have ordered the Red carpet kits before online and that is basically what it is, but the gossamer, doubled over worked better. Red Ropes: My mom sewed red velvet into tubes, and then we stuffed them with cotton batting. We made tassels from gold embroidery yarn and I hooked them to our microphone stands.

 

 

 

 

Strobe Area: My mom created this wall that she puts up every year for her classroom party-so it was already pre-done and perfect for this party.

 

 

 It is simply black plastic stapled to a long 2” wide board on one end. She took crumpled tinfoil and cut into stone shapes and spray-glued them onto the black plastic. It makes a great wall, but also an amazing effect when the strobe lights reflect off the tinfoil. She carefully takes it down and rolls it onto the board to save it and use it year after year.

Black Light Area: My mom uses these circles in her science class. She printed them onto neon paper and we just put them on the wall. They look so cool under the black lights.

 

 Piñata: I usually buy the piñata, but with 5^th grade boys, I wanted to make sure it would withstand them. We took a punch ball balloon (3 for $1 at the $store) and blew it up to the size we wanted. I covered it with a flour/water paste and newspaper strips, and tied yarn around it to make a way to hook it up.

 I did 5 or six layers. Then we spray painted it silver. We cut a hole and added the candy.  We then cut squares of tinfoil and spray glued them onto the piñata.

 Hard Rock Dance Club Sign: My mom free-handed the sign and painted it. I punched holes and added chasing Christmas lights around it.

Balloon Drop: We took a light blue piece of gossamer and tied it up to the celling to make a large bag. We filled it with 200 neon balloons. We took a string from the center and ran it to the DJ table, to release at the end of the party.

ARRIVE: When the kids showed up they got to walk the red carpet and enter. They had to bring their lanyard VIP Passes to get in. My brother, a large man, wore a black t-shirt and was the bouncer and had a clipboard with the kid’s name on it and checked to make sure that they were on the VIP list. I had printed the Hard Rock Dance Club and Birthday Event of the year onto iron-on paper and put them onto white T-shirts. I got 5 packs of Hanes T-shirts at Walmart.

 Once they got there they got to get to choose 2-3 colors of glow sticks.

 I cut them open and flipped them onto the kids shirts. The shirts glowed really cool under the black lights.

(Sorry it is sideways, but you can see what it looks like)

 

ACTIVITIES: The kids went into the dance club area, where there was the piñata disco ball, the strobe lights, disco ball, and black lights.  We had a DJ booth set-up my brother-in-law was the DJ for the party. We also had our Wii and Projector set-up and the kids play Just Dance on the Wii. We did the Limbo, Cupid Shuffle, Gangnam Style, and Macarena. They also did the conga line and got in a big circle and kids took turns doing dance moves in the center.

We took a break once the pizza was delivered and we also served cans of soda pop. After they ate they did more dancing. The DJ did lots of funs things and we gave inflatable guitars to the kids who did dance offs. Then we did the piñata. After the piñata, towards the end of the party we did the balloon release. It worked perfectly. The kids played with the balloons and then popped them all. Then they ate cake pops and opened presents. We then took all the kids to the red carpet and took group pictures (we were the paparazzi!) while we waited for the parents to arrive.

This was a crazy fun party. The only hiccup was when the pizza was 45 minutes late. The kids thought they were starving! But it was so much fun! Rock on!

Momma