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)

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29 Rooms, a Fab Kids Review With 8 Tips

Juliet is no stranger to art.  Together we spot and admire street art, explore museums as a family, enjoy mommy and me art gallery days and get invited to the coolest pop-ups. Through it all, we’ve really developed a penchant for finding cool art around the world.  But our favorite art experience thus far has been Refinery 29’s 29 rooms.  What is 29 Rooms you ask?  It’s a multi-sensory, “interactive funhouse of style, culture, & technology.”  The masterminds at Refinery 29 have partnered with global artists, corporate brands, and fashion designers to takeover and transform a grungy Brooklyn warehouse into the most magnificent fantasy world where you get to feel, smell, create and sometimes literally, jump into the art segmented and found in 29 spaces.

With only a 3 hour interval to explore 29 rooms, I calculated that left us with just 6 minutes per room including the wait time to get into each room.  Knowing that made my heart race because there were just so many amazing surprises to discover within this cavernous space.  And having seen it all last year (click here for the pictures from 2016), I knew there was something fabulous and exciting waiting for us in each space.  So without further adieu, I’m going to let the pictures do all the talking in this post.  Feast your eyes on this and tell me what your favorite room is!

The 3 hours flew by and we wanted to stay longer!  If you want to see more, check out my Instagram story NOW while it lasts for more video and sneak peeks.

Here are 8 tips for those of you with kids:

1. Only bring kids if you know they enjoy and appreciate art enough to follow directions about when they can or cannot touch artwork.  If they’re the type to run through breaking or tearing everything like a bull in a China store, it’s best to leave them home (obvi).  I only bring Juliet to so many artsy events and galleries because I completely trust and know that she will respect the artist’s (and my) wishes.
2. Yes there are bathrooms on-site so no worries that you will have to hunt one down.
3. No f&b is allowed inside and none is sold at the venue.  We made do by sneaking in some snacks in my purse and by purchasing a $1 bottle of water from the random guy on the street selling to thirsty fashionistas waiting in line
4. The Wall Street ferry from Pier 11 in Manhattan takes you to the N. Williamsburg stop in about 20 minutes (3rd stop).  Tickets are $2.75 each way and kids under a certain height (43″ I think) are free. From the terminal stop at N. Williamsburg take a left on Kent Ave, walk 3 blocks and take a right on N 9th st. and Whythe Ave will be 1 block away but before you get to Whythe, you’ll likely see a line wrapped around the corner at 9th st. anyways.
5. Dress light.  There is limited AC and no windows from which a breeze could relieve you.  We went on a perfect 70degree weather day and still found ourselves thankful we did not show up in pants/jeans.  Some rooms felt like saunas.
6. If you’re a die-hard Instagrammer, bring a change of clothes/accessories and study the hashtag #29rooms beforehand.  By now, plenty of bloggers like me have posted reveals.  Check out their posts for ideas and inspiration and plan accordingly.  (See this post on how to achieve the highly coveted, Instagram-able shot!)
7. Free up space on your phone and bring an extra portable charger.  You don’t want to be stuck missing out on recording these amazing scenes and memories because your phone just died or you’re out of memory!
8. Download the new and free 29Rooms Interactive App which will serve as your personal tour guide for inside and outside the 29 rooms area.

If you’re a follower of my FB page then you’ve likely seen my alert the day Refinery 29’s tickets went on sale.  Tickets have sold out at this point but Refinery 29 was conducting social media giveaways so I’d follow them on IG and check Craig’s list for scalpers if you’re dying to get in but were too late to the game.

Now go ahead, what was your favorite room?

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