Celebrating

8 Tips To Host the Best Back-To-School Bash

Back-to-school season is exciting for a whole host of reasons:  parents get their time back, kids see their school friends again, everyone buys something new, and you look forward to a brand new start.  Why not mark the occasion with a back-to-school bash they’ll never forget?  That’s what we at Fab Kids did in NYC with our friends and followers!  Once families were settled into their new routines, we gathered everyone up at the NY Kids Club which offered their fun padded, play space, arts and crafts room and incredibly helpful staff.  And we got GEEKY!  Here are 8 tips on how to host the best back-to-school bash that your friends have ever seen!

1.  Send a themed invite. Choose a scholastic image that you want to carry throughout your party. For instance, our rainbow colored pencils from the invite were found as cookies at the event on a rainbow colored dessert table.  The rainbow color theme was also found in the photo booth garlands, numbers, alphabets and balloons throughout the space.  Invite text included phrases with lots of alliteration such as, “brainiac book swap, dorky dance-a-thon, and NYC nerds.”  Make it fun, descriptive, and enticing!  It sets the tone!  Get your guests excited!
2. Dress up!  Fab Kids events always have a fun fashion theme.  For this one, we encouraged everyone to get geeky by posting inspiration photos in our social media and eblasts. (search #fab_nerd on IG if you want to see)  And we offered prizes for ‘best dressed.’ I love having dress-up themes for events becomes they become an automatic ice breaker on-site.  Plus it encourages creativity and whimsy from all the guests making the event something special to look forward to.  Plus the pictures…  can we say, ‘Instagram-able?’
3. Host a book swap.  I’m a big fan of re-cycling and re-using what you have.  And I believe one person’s trash can be another person’s treasure.  We encouraged each Brainiac to bring in a book they’ve outgrown or gotten bored of and swap it for another gently used book.  We actually had so many to giveaway from our own bookshelf that each child walked away with 2 new books!  The book swap had the additional side effect of adding a fun community feel to the event.
4. Prepare arts and crafts for the whole family to try.  For our themed activity, the little ones created masterpieces on composition books provided by one of our sponsors, Ba Ba Bling.  I provided alphabet stickers, scholastic-looking, scrapbook paper, and school stickers for the little hands to decorate with.  The older kids enjoyed making bead bracelets and necklaces with colorful string and alphabet beads. Parents created mock certificates, filling in the space for their children’s “most likely to____”award, all of which became fun photo props.
5. Offer smart snacks and sweets.  For desserts think nerds, dum dum lollipops, smarties, gummy brains and cupcakes topped with nerd glasses.  For water find the brand Smart Water.  And for snacks you could offer alphabet crackers and dip, Smart Food popcorn, pretzels or cereal shaped as letters, or any small snack stuffed into pocket protectors! B Lee Events did a wonderful job providing and presenting creative themed options such as these.  And they were such a pleasure to work with -so professional, cheery, and full of amazing ideas!  I highly recommend them!
6. Prepare photo props.  With fashions this smart, your guests will be studying each other!  Our guests definitely got an A+ when it came to getting dressed to impress!  Fab kids and fab parents, for sure!  For your party, gather props that you already have around the house and offer them to guests to try on!  I brought ties, bow ties, a calculator, a ruler, school bus toys, nerd glasses and a giant inflatable #2 pencil.  ..yes I had all of that around the house lol.  What can I say?  This is the 3rd back-to-school nerdy NY party that I’ve hosted!  See here for 2015 and 2014. 
7. Dance the day away!  We called ours a “dorky dance-a-thon”, pumped up the music and let everyone shake it out in the colorful, play space that was NY Kids Club.  Kids danced on giant trampolines, snapped their suspenders, and busted a move with balloons, in the air waving around like they just don’t care!  If you wanted, you could have a leader teach some simple, nerdy dance moves for the kids to follow along to Simon Says style to add to the theme or make that an entirely separate game altogether. 
8. Giveaway goodies.  I like to always send my guests home with a little something to remember the event by.  This event came fully sponsored so our guests walked away with tons of amazing items worth more than 12x the price of their event ticket. (free event planning consultation from B. Lee Events, $50 off a NY Kids Club new class enrollment and a free PJ party, $42 worth of customized Mabels Labels, exclusive offers to get onto Little Spoon’s organic meal delivery service waitlist, trendy buttons from Kidpik, $50 off new Usborne and More books, Shopkins themed lip balms from Moose Toys, discounted Meisterdish offers, and more)!  But for your party it could be as simple as sending guests home with the remaining items from the snack and dessert bar in cute themed bags.  My daughter decorated our goody bags with alphabet stickers easily converting it from a plain purple bag to a themed one!

Thank you to everyone who came out and helped make this party such a BLAST!  I had so much fun seeing you get down in your geekiest gear.  Thank you to all the event sponsors who helped make this happen!  See below for details!  And see our FB page for the full album of event photos.

Venue and event staff- NY Kids Club Battery Park City

Mocktails and tastings by Little Spoon

Smart snacks and sweet table by B. Lee Events

Colored pencil cookies by Baked By Tal

Giveaway prize package worth $50 from Lucky & Me

Designer nerdy tees and composition book craft by Ba Ba Bling Kids

Customized name labels for each guest from Mabels Labels

Stickers and free book offer by Usborne and More

Moose Toys Shopkins lip balms

50% off Meisterdish meal delivery kit

Jand G Handmade for the lovely back-to-school themed hair clip awarded to the female winner of the “best dressed” title)

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Teddy Bear Tea Time with Bubble Fun

Where did summer go?  As summer’s last hurrah, I organized a last minute, mommy and me meetup and decided to theme it around a teddy bear tea time.  Each child was asked to bring in a favorite teddy bear and join us at our place for a posh play date filled with tea sets, bears and bubbles!  Thanks to Gazillion Bubbles, we were able to wow our guests with the most fun bubble makers the kids had ever seen.

We started the play date outdoors by setting up a picnic area for Juliet, her friends, and their teddy bears.  A play tea set and felted desserts took center stage while the little ones playfully challenged one another to blow bigger and bigger bubbles.

This was possible thanks to the incredibubble wands, giant palm jugglers, giant bubble mill and giant power wand supplied to us by Funrise and Gazillion Bubbles.  They made bubble making (and bursting) a breeze even for these 4 year olds!  Even us jaded moms (and teddy bears) were seriously impressed.

After all that excitement, we went in for a little snack and toddler tea time with our teddies.

Snacks consisted of cranBEARy trail mix (with teddy grahams, pretzels, popcorn and rice cakes), mixed BEARies, mini cupcakes that Juliet made topped with Teddy graham cracker heads, and Nabisco teddy bear treats along with a selection of hot or cold teas and water.

The moms enjoyed our own version of bubbly.  And each of our champagne glasses were filled with a special treat.

Decor consisted of recycled, re-purposed Oh Joy for Target decor, wrapping paper and Target dollar bin fans that I featured at my ice cream socials this past summer and other parties.

For the activity, Juliet led storytime by singing “Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See.”

I was so proud of my little hostess with the mostest!

Not only did she do a perfect job reciting the book from memory (1 of 5 books she has memorized word for word), but she was an absolute sweetheart sharing all her toys, helping get drinks and prepping for the party.

Other unBEARably cute party details included the teddy bear face masks that I created by cutting a free printable I found online and then adding a chopstick and washi tape to the back.

They doubled as party decor (each was placed at their table setting) and was also used as a photo prop.

Teddy bears sat nearby to hang out and get fed and bear paw prints lined our front entrance and hallway floors leading everyone towards the PAWty.

I can’t believe summer vacation is already coming to a close. These buddies begin school next Thursday and have collected many fun memories to begin the school year with.  I hope you also enjoyed your summer vacation!

Tell me what you liked most about this bubbly teddy bear tea!

 

Special thanks to our product sponsor, Gazillion Bubbles and RenBeaniePR for helping us to celebrate the last bit of summer in such a memorable way!  To see these bubbles live in action see my IG story today or click here for a full demo.