Recently my son turned 8 and like most 8 years olds, he is OBSESSED with Minecraft. I try to be creative but this year, my time and budget were limited. I used grass found at discount party supplies to frame the centerpieces. They were the trees made from a utility set found with pixelated mini blocks at Target ($30). This was great because throughout the party kids were building towers and I used it as an anchor activity until all the guests arrived. My decorations were mostly homemade or printed from the Internet and blown up. My husband taped square black paper plates with purple napkins for eyes and black streamers for arms and legs to make an Enderman. He used green construction paper to make the Creeper. (He's so creative!!! ) I used a collage of several blocks taped together to make the back wall.
Here are some of the activities I organized for the 20+ children we had over.
# 1 Mining for Diamonds, I got some "gems" of various colors from http://www.discountpartysupplies.com/boy-party-supplies/minecraft-party-supplies and buried 100 of them with sand in 3 buckets from Home Depot. I split the boys into three groups and had an adult stand in front of each bucket. Each child got about 15 seconds and dug in the sand for as many gems as they could get. At the end of their round they put them in the bag the adult was holding and went to the end of the line. The team with the most got "coal" candy that was available at the Dollar Tree during Christmas time. We played two rounds!
#2. Minecraft Bingo I found this on CatchMyParty.com. This is a free downloadable and again with each winner I gave them a choice of coal or gold (Rolos). This was a major time filler- I thought they would be kind of bored with it but they loved it and wanted to keep going so I rewarded 10 bingo players and then had them fill the whole card. Big Hit!!!
#3. "Creeper Ball" This was the crowd favorite and cost me $10 to make. I used a Sharpie to draw a Creeper Face on several green balls. They then played dodge ball until the Pizza came. I split them into two groups and called the next people in when someone was hit.
The pizza had a Creeper face that a local pizzeria was happy to make using Pepperoni. I used the printables from www.catchmyparty.com to create labels for the candy bar. We used rolos for Gold, Cherry Sours for Redstone, Licorice for TNT, and chocolate Coal for Coal. The cake was from a local grocery store that printed an image I found on the internet. For favors, Each child got a blow up torch from discount party supplies, they were cute but did not have the flap to keep the air in and were hard to blow up. They also each got a Minecraft tattoo and stickers in addition to the goody bag they made from the candy bar.
All in all it was a great day and I love when my son tells me it was his favorite party yet. (He says this every year!!)
