The Pinkest Party of All

Here’s a program we offered over Winter Break that would be just perfect for Valentine’s Day (or any time!): a Pinkalicious Party!

Pinkalicious by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann was one of our most in-demand books over the summer, so we wanted to offer a program centered around this beloved book. Originally, we had planned to offer more of a sit-down tea party-type program, but the response was so huge that we switched our program around so we could accommodate more kids.

Want to throw a Pinkalicious Party of your own? Here’s what we did:

We decorated the room in all pink (of course!). We hung pink decorations from the ceiling and covered the tables in pink tablecloths.

We served pink snacks. We bought pink wafer cookies (inside the pink napkin cones for easy carrying), snack cakes with pink icing, and pink lemonade. Other ideas would be animal crackers with pink icing, cotton candy, cherries, raspberries or strawberries. We did the snack cakes to make it a little easier on ourselves, prep-wise, but you could bake pink cupcakes or a pink cake or make pink sugar cookies using a little red food coloring.

We played pink games. We put down pink tic tac toe using pink tape for the game board and cardboard covered in pink construction paper for the pieces. We created a Pin the Cherry on the Cupcake (using velcro on the cherry). And we brought out our bowling pins (not pink, but still a fun party game!). We also had a couple of board games in reserve just in case we had anyone who got bored.

We had a pink book display. In the center there is a bowl of pink marshmallows and kids could write down their guess for how many marshmallows were in the bowl. The closest ones got to take one of our Pinkalicious bookmarks home!

We did a pink craft. We made knot scrunchies, using cut up plastic tablecloths in white and pink instead of using fabric. This is a super easy craft for kids that have an adult with them. In each baggie, we put a simple hair elastic (it doesn’t matter what color – the elastic won’t show) and 13 or 14 strips of plastic tablecloth. We made sure to get elastics big enough that they could be worn around the wrist if the girls didn’t want to wear them in their hair.

Since the cure for “Pinkitis” is to eat something green, we made sure to have a green book display by the exit.

And we made sure to send them home with a little green food. In this case, broken up candy cane pieces, but you could use any green candy or – gasp! – even a vegetable, grapes, kiwi, or green apple.

Since we were expecting so many, we set up the room with different stations and let families wander around, playing games, doing the craft, eating their snack. We did call everyone together about half an hour into the program and Miss A read Pinkalicious. The entire program lasted about an hour, although some people left earlier (the room was quite full with just over 100 kids of all ages in attendance).

Check out the Pinkalicious website for printables and party ideas (opens a PDF).

Anyone else have any pink ideas?

— Abby Johnson, Children’s Manager
New Albany-Floyd County Public Library
New Albany, IN
http://www.abbythelibrarian.com