Fun Kids' Birthday Party Theme Ideas

Encourage party guests to get creative with a birthday party theme that explores creativity. Whether your birthday party focuses on dancing, cooking, performing, or producing, kids will come home with birthday memories that jump-start their imaginations.

Everybody dance now! No sitting around at this party. This party theme gets everyone groovin? to the music. Help kids show their cool moves, and celebrate your child?s birthday with lots of energy.

• Party Invitation: Type details on pink cardstock no wider than 3 inches. Trace a soup can around the text and cut. Glue to a small black paper plate for a vintage-record invitation.
• Party Decorations: Cut paper starbursts from patterned and solid papers. Sandwich each between two compact discs and hang them from the ceiling. You can also dangle them from a doorway, tape them to a wall, or create a garland. Add a glittering disco ball for even more fun.
• Party Activities: Keep the party guests movin? and groovin? with fun games, such as freeze dance, silly karaoke, the limbo, and a Hula-Hoop contest. Hire a local dance teacher to teach new dance moves.
• Party Food: Give your dancers fun snacks like popcorn disco balls and ?do the twist? pizza breadsticks. Prepare a tray of bling-bling cupcakes, decorated with oversize nonpareils and rock candy.
• Party Favors: Your performers will be psyched to take home colorful slap bracelets, star-shape candies, glittery yo-yos, dance stickers, light-up pens, or glitter nail polish. Pack the prizes in clear plastic containers decorated with adhesive jewels to make cute swag bags.

Give your little kitchen helper top billing with this birthday party theme. Party guests will have as much fun creating their own party treats as they will eating them. It may get a little messy, but the giggles will be worth the cleanup. And the kids can help with that, too!

• Party Invitation: Send an invite in the form of a recipe card to inspire your guests to get into the cooking mood. The ingredients for this party are a bunch of friends, three cups of fun, and a pinch of creativity! Add a few party details and you have a recipe for success.
• Party Decorations: Write a welcome on a chalkboard easel. Cover the tabletops with Italian restaurant-style red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and hang a kid-size apron over each chair.
• Party Activities: Give each little chef a premade pizza crusts and wooden spoon. Arrange bowls with sauce and various toppings on the tables within easy reach of the kids. After the partygoers assemble their pizzas, give them fabric markers to decorate their aprons while the food bakes.
• Party Food: In addition to individual pizzas, serve sugar cookies frosted to look like miniature pizzas. Let cookies cool, then spread on a circle of red icing as tomato sauce, a few squiggles of green icing as peppers, and lots of dashes of white icing as cheese.
• Party Favors: Personalize a chef?s hat for each guest with iron-on letters. Make letters with fabric and iron-on adhesive or buy them premade.

Check out our birthday party favor ideas.

It's story time. Kids will clamor for a chance to perform in this birthday party puppet theater. Encourage their creativity with extra puppets and small props they can use as they perform for the other birthday party guests.

• Party Invitation: Turn a brown paper bag into a puppet-face invitation. Cut eyes, nose, and a mouth from construction paper; write a party detail on each piece, making sure all the details are included with each set. Tuck a set of facial features inside each bag. To read the invite, guests must assemble the face of the puppet.
• Party Decorations: Welcome the party guests with a sign that announces the time of the show. Construct a simple puppet theater from a large cardboard box. Add fabric swags with decorative ribbon tiebacks as curtains.
• Party Activities: Instead of sock puppets, create wooden spoon characters. Dress up wooden spoons with felt, googly eyes, and other crafts supplies. Let each party guest put on an improv puppet show and record it. Later, send the files to parents to see.
• Party Food: Top open-face mini bagels with cold cuts and veggies cut in shapes to make faces. For dessert, serve Rice Krispies treats on sticks. Use icing to attach candy or sprinkles for a face and licorice laces as hair.
• Party Favors: Don't let the performance end here. Give a few inexpensive finger puppets in little bags; tie them up with a ribbon for each guest. Send the kids off with a round of applause for their performances.

Create a star-studded birthday celebration with your birthday kid and all the party guests in award-winning roles. With a few props, dress-up clothes, and a video camera, you?ll produce a party that deserves a standing ovation.

• Party Invitation: Send out movie ticket invitations to this world premiere party. Use movie terms to tell guests when and where they?ll be making and starring in the movie.
• Party Decorations: Create a movie set with director?s chairs, racks of costumes, and boxes of props. Use favorite movie posters to create atmosphere.
• Party Activities: Make this bash a full production. Let the party crew make up their own script and choose props and costumes. Capture their performances on video and host a screening complete with bowls of popcorn and an awards ceremony.
• Party Food: A blockbuster movie demands movie food. Feed your moviegoers with the classics: popcorn, hot dogs, cheesy nacho chips, and candy.
• Party Favors: Make or buy DVD holders. Have guests embellish the holders, including their movie name. Send kids home with copies of their movie and mini awards for their movie success.

Try these movie night popcorn recipes.