Strawberry Shortcake Party

For my youngest daughter's 4th Birthday, she wanted a Strawberry Shortcake party. For the invitations, we made our own by using a small coloring image on the front of the invitation with all the party info on the inside. My daughter was then able to help by coloring all of the pictures on the invitations.

I drew a large Strawberry Shortcake that I coloured with pencil crayon and then cut out for a wall decoration. I made a picket fence for the wall and taped strawberries onto it for a picture area. I made sure to take pictures of my daughter with each friend and Strawberry Shortcake!

I made strawberry decorations. I used large hearts (purchased after Valentine's Day on sale)

and Shamrocks that I bought from Michael's. I rounded the bottom of the hearts so they would look more strawberryish and cut out the shamrocks to look like leaves. I drew black seeds on both sides of the strawberries and I hung these all over the ceiling with green ribbon to look like vines. I also used red and pink balloons on the ceiling. Some balloons I attached to dowels with green leaves and drew black seeds on them. I put them in a vase to look like bunches of strawberries.

When the guests arrived, they could colour different coloring pictures that I had printed from the internet, or play with the strawberry shortcake dolls that we had. We played a few games. One of them was like musical chairs, or a cake walk. I downloaded some pictures of the characters from Strawberry Shortcake and printed them off. I cut them out and glued them onto cardstock. I laid these on the floor and played music. When the music stopped, I picked a name of one of the characters out of a hat and that girl was out. They got to help start and stop the music until the next player was out. The grand winner could get a prize, but I didn't want to make anyone sad, so I didn't give prizes.

The next activity was to decorate graham cracker houses.

I had made the houses in advance and had icing in individual

containers for each child. I also gave each girl a container

with candies for decorating the houses. They loved this activity. I think they may have eaten more icing than they used for decorating!

Since the kids were already sitting at the table,
we had cupcakes next. I made them look
like little baskets with a strawberry in it. I used

licorice for the handle.

After this, my daughter opened gifts and then the kids played for awhile. The next activity was a strawberry hunt in the backyard. We put strawberry candies all over the backyard and gave the kids little baskets to collect strawberries, just like Strawberry Shortcake likes to do. They loved looking

all through the grass for the candies. While they were doing this the parents arrived to pick up their kids.

For the goody bags, we gave a Strawberry Shortcake doll (from McDonald's - they had them as their happy meal toy just before our party), Strawberry Shortcake stickers, Strawberry Shortcake pens, their graham cracker house and their basket with strawberry candies.
Everyone had a great time!