It’s a Great Kids Summer Party at Camp Grandma!

After our six-week Camp Grandma program, we celebrated with a summer party. But you don’t need Camp Grandma as a reason to give the grandkids a good time.

Here’s how we did it.

Our party ran from 1:30 to 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon. This was a blow-out celebration and we put as much effort into preparing for it as we would a holiday event. We played games, took a break for snacks, then played some more.

This party had many moving parts–but you can simplify your version based on available time and budget.

Getting Ready: T-Shirts and Certificates

Last year, I branded my Camp Grandma program by designing a logo. This makes the program tangible to the kids, and links the individual activities together to give it cohesion. It’s easy to create your own logo using Canva, a design website where you can appropriate an existing design and modify it to make it your own.

The end of Camp Grandma is a milestone, and I wanted to recognize the grandkids for their successful participation in the program. So, I presented each child with a certificate of completion and a Camp Grandma T-shirt.

To make the certificates, I copied the logo into a Word document and added the certification information, printed it on white cardstock, then wrote in the child’s name and date, and finally, added an embossed gold seal.

For the T-shirts, I printed the logo on fabric transfers using an inkjet printer, and ironed on the design.

Next, to package the whole, I glued the logo on two shopping bags and tucked in the certificate and T-shirt for each child. Later, the bags would come in handy to stash prizes that the kids would win playing games.

Lastly, I tied a ballon to each bag.

Getting Ready: Prizes

Finding inexpensive prizes was a challenge. I bought a party favor toy assortment for the piñata, and some packs of tattoos and water bottle stickers. Most of these prizes come in quantities meant for a party of kids; not just two individuals. In the end, I didn’t distribute all the items, because giving out a bunch of duplicates devalues the worth of the prizes. Better to save some for another day.

Target turned out to be my best resource. Coming off the escalator, I noticed some bins of kid-friendly items, some as inexpensive as $1. This display might just be a seasonal offering for teachers to purchase as student incentives, but it was a wonderful discovery for me!

Getting Ready: Menu and Food Prep

I’ll admit this part was over the top. My younger son volunteered to make finger foods and outperformed everyone’s expectations. He cooked up a selection of carnival fare, and served everything up in red plastic, fast-food baskets, complete with red-check paper liners that he had sourced from Amazon. The food and presentation were a huge hit!

Our party chef made corn dogs by following a YouTube demo. Guided by another YouTube tutorial, he baked up some pizza sticks, stuffed with shredded mozzarella and pepperoni. While there is no recipe for the pizza dough, you could try this food processor recipe that I use frequently with the grandkids.

Also on the menu were foods he prepared without recipes: chicken tenders seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil, encased in a crunchy, fish-and-chips style batter. Coleslaw, made from shredded cabbage seasoned with mayo, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and a handful of golden raisins, was delicious. And my son deep-fried frozen french fries to get them nice and crisp.

The dipping sauces were mustard (a mixture on Dijon mustard, honey, and mayo), and barbecue sauce (bottled barbecue sauce, ketchup, and mayo).

My contribution was a batch of easy and luscious Maida Heatter’s All-American Brownies that I had baked in advance.

If all this cooking seems daunting, simply buy heat-and serve snacks and provide packaged nibbles like Goldfish.

Getting Ready: Presentation

The summer party was also designed to showcase the kids’ work at Camp Grandma. So, using the glass doors that face the garden as my display board, I taped representations of select projects, using blue painter’s tape.

I mounted photos of the our camp activities on 12- X 12-inch cardstock sheets, using photo corners so that the parents could take the photos home afterwards. The activity categories included: science and geography, cookie store, cooking, tea party, arts and crafts, reading, and making a book.

A second glass door featured Miss T’s illustrations of every book we had read together and Little N’s vocabulary worksheets.

Start the Party: Camp Grandma Presentations

First, each child received their certificate and T-shirt. Grandpa used his iPad to play Pomp and Circumstance, the graduation song, to get us in the mood.

Once we had the awards underway, it was time to let the games begin!

Summer Party Games: Bean Bag Toss

Miss T and I sewed bean bags at Camp Grandma to use for this game.

Materials Needed:

• Six bean bags
• A variety of different-size vessels: boxes, lids, pie pans, etc.
• Cardstock circles or squares to assign points to each vessel

How to Play:

• Lay out the vessels, staggering the configuration to make some easier and some harder to aim for.
• Toss a few practice bean bags to determine which ones are the most challenging, to calibrate your point system.
• Write the points value on the cardstock and place one in each vessel. I used 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 50 points to make the scoring easier.
• Take turns tossing the bean bags into the vessels and counting points; we did three sets to determine the winner. This was a good math exercise for Miss T, who was the designated scorekeeper.

Summer Party Games: Pyramid Knock Down

At our last session of Camp Grandma, Miss T and I covered cans in cardstock in preparation for the pyramid knock down game. Instead of arranging the pyramid on a table, carnival style, we set the cans on the floor, as for bowling. Little N is too young to have the strength and aim to knock over a pyramid placed on a table.

Materials Needed:

• 6 empty food cans to make a pyramid.
• Cardstock to cover cans
• Small ball with enough weight to be able to knock the cans down

How to Play:

• Stack the cans.
• Depending on your set-up, pitch the ball at a pyramid on a table or roll it to knock the cans down on the floor.
• Count the number of cans overturned (we allowed two tries per turn) to determine your score.
• Since we turned our pyramid into a bowling game, we used a heavy metal ball from a French pétanque set.

Summer Games: Egg Relay

Everyone knows this one, but we added a twist. Instead of just using spoons, to handicap the race, the youngest was given a Chinese skimmer ladle called a spider and the adults used two chopsticks, balancing the egg between the two sticks.

Materials Needed:

• Hard-boiled egg for each team (you can use raw eggs for more drama, but you’ll also need more eggs to allow for breakage)
• Different types of carriers for the eggs (such as spoons, ladles or chopsticks), depending on the ages and skills of the children

How to Play:

• We formed three teams: kids, parents, and grandparents.
• Little N was assigned the Chinese skimmer ladle, Miss T had a regular spoon, and adults used chopsticks.
• For the chopsticks, you need to balance the egg between the two sticks; don’t try to pick up the egg with chopsticks as you would food.

Summer Games: Piñata

Materials Needed:

• Piñata — Miss T and I made our own
• Toys and candy
• A way to hang the piñata
• Heavy stick or bat
• Blindfold (we used daddy’s hat pulled over the eyes)

How to Play:

We have no tree in our yard, so we tied the piñata to a sturdy stick and the children’s dad held on to it while the kids whacked away.

We encountered some unexpected challenges.

By using printer paper to make our piñata instead of thinner newspaper, we created a hardier piñata that was too tough for little ones to break open easily. In the end, we made a cut with a box cutter to weaken the piñata.

Repackaging candy in small cellophane bags was not a good idea. I did this so the kids wouldn’t end up with too many sweets. The bags are very thin so some were damaged by the assault on the piñata. Next time, I’ll choose candy and packaging that is sturdier.

I’m all for sharing, so the kids gathered the contents of the piñata on daddy’s jacket and sorted out the spoils equitably.

Summer Games: Fishing

Do this game last, in case you have prizes leftover that you want to give away. You’ll need to be hidden from the kids behind a barrier. We used a stone wall.

Materials Needed:

• A few prizes
• Clean trash (crumpled paper, empty vitamin bottle, empty printer cartridge, etc.)
• Sturdy stick for the fishing pole
• String for the fishing line
• Large binder clamp for the fishing hook
• Paper bags to organize the trash and prizes to have them sorted out before hooking the items to the pole

How to Play:

• Assemble the fishing pole using the stick, string, and binder clip.
• Have the kids cast the line over the barrier.
• The person behind the barrier attaches an item and gives the line a tug, to signal that something is biting.
• Have the kids pull up trash a few times before hooking on a prize.

Planning and executing this summer party was a lot of work, but well worth the effort. It was an event focused entirely on the children, with the whole family’s involvement, playing together and being together. And it was a wonderful culmination to Camp Grandma 2021.

Next Week: Camp Grandma Evaluation

Next week I’ll give an overview of what went right and what could have been improved at this year’s Camp Grandma. I’ll also share some of the activities we did that never made it into a blog post, such as some science projects and the geography work we did.

If you missed any of our six Camp Grandma sessions, they’re archived at the end of this Camp Grandma post.

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