Party Idea – Beach Party

Party Idea - Beach

This Beach party idea is a little extra special as it’s was for my little boy 🙂 The photos are looking a little old as this party was in 2009.

We created a Beach/Pool party for his 1st birthday party and it was lots of fun, even the adults had fun.

I printed surfboards for cupcake toppers and used flip flop shoe keyrings , We also printed off some shark fins to use as cupcake toppers. I laminated the printouts so they were firm enough to stick into the cupcake and could be washed and re-used if required.

Party Guests were able to keep the shoe keyring from their cupcake if they wanted to and every child got a plastic beach bucket and an inexpensive beach towel to take home.

A beach party would not be complete without a sandpit and giant beach ball so we added those too.

The party food was all about sand, so I used my food mixer to crush graham crackers for the sand, you could use any type of light brown biscuit.

The fruit sticks were a huge hit and I added a Shark Gummy to the top of the lolly sticks.

I decorated the table with thin bird netting which was very inexpensive and small plastic sand molds.

We dressed up in Lifeguard shirts and the kids just wore swimmers.

Beach Party Cupcakes

Beach Sand Pit

Beach Umbrellas

Bucket of chips

Beach themed food

Beach party decorations

Hot Chips

Sandcastle cake

One of the subjects that’s often covered in preschool is learning about the five senses. Understanding our senses helps us describe the world around us and our experience in it, and it’s fun to explore the senses in different ways.

Rock Your Homeschool has a great free printables pack having to do with the five senses. I love the foldable activity shown above because it emphasizes that the way we really experience our senses is through our brains. They also have a sensory scavenger hunt printable, which doesn’t include taste but has the rest of the senses included.

Of course we don’t really want kids tasting things they find outside (unless you happen to have fruit or vegetables growing nearby) but I like the way Hands on Teaching Ideas handled it by including “something an animal would eat” on their five senses scavenger hunt.

Sea of Knowledge has lots of ideas for things to do with preschoolers to learn about the five senses, as well as this free with email signup template for making a five senses craft (you could also trace the child’s hands instead of using the hands in the template if you like).

Use a potato head toy you probably already have to play a five senses game with the download from A Little Pinch of Perfect. You could do the same thing on paper with a potato (or human body) shape and color on the different sense organs.

Simple Everyday Mom has a cute set of senses puppets you can print and play with, or use for different projects and crafts.

Preschool Packets has a whole set of posts dealing with teaching the five senses (the one linked here is for hearing but the rest are linked within that post), which includes a great idea for making shakers with kids to explore the sense of hearing.

Tim’s Printables has some cute five senses printables where kids can match the image to the sense you’d use to explore it. There’s also a body to label but I think there’s only a male version.

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