Entertaining 11-14 year olds?
Need some holiday party ideas for a pretty large orphanage of 11-14 year olds. Limited budget is another issue, fundraising only brought in around $400 for the party (holiday gifts and food are taken care of).
So you need ideas for games and things to play with the kids? Could you maybe try decorating cookies? We used to do that at daycare when I was little...You could have pre-baked sugar cookies and all kinds of stuff there to decorate them...Or building gingerbread houses (we used to do it with empty milk cartons as a base and graham cracker squares in place of ginger bread)
Maybe those are a bit kid-ish but I still love doing both :)
Are they girls, boys, both?
Girls and boys.
The decorating cookies and making gingerbread houses thing would be cute but it's a pretty big group and I think it would be too expensive. :(
How about bingo? I have a girl scout troop with girls in the 11-14 age range and they always love it. You can search online for free printable bingo cards. All you need to buy is white paper for printing out the bingo cards, a different color of paper for cutting out the little chips for marking the spots, and some cheap prizes from the dollar store.
Have you considered getting a local bakery/bakeries to sponsor the event? Say for materials or maybe at half of wholesale cost?
Kids in that age group love boardgames. Monopoly,Life,Trivia games for teenagers,twister is even still fun for that age group........doing the limbo to music I dunno Im just tossing ideas around. Im sure these kids will appreciate anything you can come up with=)
Some fun games that few people know about:
Munchkins
Fluxx
Thank you everyone! I'm going to pass all these ideas on to my mom... this is her project she's working on with some of her friends and she asked me to brainstorm some ideas.
How big of a group are we talking about? If you make the frosting yourselves and buy the big bags of cheap but pretty candies for decorating, graham cracker gingerbread houses don't have to be that expensive :)
Same with the cookies if you bake those yourselves. Most recipes make a couple dozen of them, so the individual ingredients can go pretty far...
I also really like the bingo idea.
Hope everything turns out fun!
How about letting everyone make their own pizza. They could also do a spoofy "Night Before Christmas" play (let them write it).
I cant help but think music and dancing because of the age - maybe dance contests, DJing with a CD player and some disks.
I love board games but I think of an energy level kids that age can have and am trying to think of non stationary games like charades - something group interactive.
They could do impromptu skits-Holiday themed? Bring a bunch of old clothes and make them kind of funny -set it up charades style. i.e.-have them draw from a hat. Like you're santa and you're raiding a kitchen b/c you're starving and the owner of the house catches you...silly stuff like that. Middle school kids like to act. You could have them write their own theme song for christmas-especially a rap song.
I love #11 suggestion. pizza is so fun to make and eat and the night before christmas play would be awesome for teens to do.
Are you allowed to do Christmas things or would that make some of the kids feel left out? (If they don't celebrate it I mean)
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