Minute to Win It Birthday Party

Our daughter Abigail turned ten this year and she asked for a Minute to Win It birthday party theme. The kids have been loving watching reruns of that show! It was a great idea because that tween age group can be tricky. They are getting too old for some traditional kid stuff, but are still too young for more mature things. She also requested a Twilight-themed birthday cake, which she wanted to decorate herself. Um, okay. Turns out, it made a great theme for that age group, kept them all engaged, and it also happened to be the easiest and most affordable birthday party we’ve ever thrown. Yay!

Abby’s actual birthday fell on Easter, so the birthday celebration was pushed back a week. Of course, on Easter there was still lots of celebrating. One quick thing I did want to show you before we get on to the party was the cute Easter baskets the Easter bunny brought us this year. I guess he knew we are minimizing and trying to reduce our waste, because instead of traditional plastic baskets with grass and stuffed animals, the kids got new bike helmets filled with a bathing suit for each of them and a few pieces of candy. They’ve been using the helmets and bathing suits all summer.

Now onto the Minute to Win It party. Here’s the birthday girl. She’s obviously not dramatic AT ALL.

We invited a few friends from school and of course her siblings, so there were seven kids at the party in total. Abby requested a build your own taco bar and steamed shrimp, which is her favorite food. Since we always have taco supplies, the shrimp and the cake from the grocery store bakery were the only things I actually purchased for this party. We had some red cups and plates left over from Christmas and we used those since Abby felt like it fit with the Twilight part of her theme.

The Games

Cookie Challenge

This was the first and easiest game we played. We used my husband’s phone to set a timer for one minute and let the kids try to slide a cookie from their foreheads into their mouths, without using their hands. All the kids loved this one!

Cup Stacking

In this game you have one minute to stack the cups into a tower, then take it down and put the cups inside of each other, then re-stack the tower one more time.

We divided the table into two teams and gave each team random points for things like fastest time or completing a challenge. We kept score on a tabletop chalkboard I already owned.

Suck It Up

I forgot to take pictures of this one, but we used straws to have the kids try to use suction to transfer M&Ms from one small bowl to another. See who can move the most candy in one minute. This was a big hit with the kids as well!

Falling Cups

To be honest, this game didn’t work very well and we ended up ditching it. I think it’s because we tried using birthday cards instead of index cards. In theory, you stack cups on top of index cards, then you remove the cards and try to get the cups to fall onto each other in a straight line. Unfortunately, no one was able to make this one work, but maybe you’ll have more luck!

I’d actually recommend you do a different game instead. I wish we would have done…

Birthday Wrapping

In a team of two, one person can only use their left hand and the other can only use their right hand. Work together to wrap a present.

The Party

Those games were a great way to keep a mixture of boys and girls ages 7-12 entertained!

The party was two hours, and it was a perfect amount of time. We did 30 minutes for food and socializing, 1 hour for games, then 30 minutes for cake and presents.

This group of kids was great at working together and there were several games they wanted to repeat, so it was easy to fill up the time. In the past, if I need to fill time entertaining kids at a birthday party, I hand out brown paper lunch bags and markers and have them decorate their own party favor bags. Then I would just give them each a scoop of whatever candy we were having at the party, such as the M&M’s from the Suck It Up game, or fill them with popcorn.

Kids don’t care if their parties are elaborate or expensive. They just want to be recognized and celebrated.

Abby’s Cake

Abby wanted to help decorate her own cake, and she wanted it to be Twilight-themed. She also wanted ice cream cake. We just bought one from the grocery store and a tube of red icing. She squeezed the letters onto the cake, and we printed out some pictures from a simple Google search. We just printed them on regular paper and stuck it on the cake, then we took the paper off before we ate it.