Family Friendly St. Patrick's Day Party Ideas

Everyone loves a party and St. Patrick's Day can be fun for the whole family! There are more ways to celebrate than drinking green beer and going to bars!

My neighbor teaches first grade and these are some things I'm helping her do for her classroom party this year. Maybe you can use these ideas, or variations of them, for your own party!

DECORATIONS

Get your kids involved in making the decorations. Let them hang green, white and gold colored streamers from the ceilings or along the walls. Or let them cut shamrocks out of construction paper or craft foam and string them together to make fun garlands to decorate the doorways and backs of chairs. You can also just toss some of the shamrocks on tables for decoration. Kids can also blow up balloons and tie different colored yarn on them to create an Irish rainbow effect. You can also use double sided tape to attach some of the construction paper shamrocks onto the sides of the balloons for a fun look. It doesn't really matter how you decorate, as long as you have fun and get the kids involved!

GAMES

A fun game to play is "Pot of Gold Coin Toss". It's a very simple game that is easy to understand for all age groups, and is a lot of fun for everyone. You'll need a cardboard box, gold spray paint, and some chocolate candy coins (the ones covered in the gold colored foil). Simply spray paint your cardboard box using the gold spray paint and you're done! Put the box in the middle of the room and hand out 5 or so gold coins to each person playing. Whoever gets the most coins in the box wins a prize!

FOOD

Food can be fun too, and there are a lot of things kids can help create!

One of my favorite kid-friendly foods is "cookie sandwiches". Here's how to make them. Simply bake up a few batches of sugar cookies and decorate them using Irish colored icing (it's simple to use food coloring to turn white icing into green and yellow colored icing). Note: you'll only want to decorate half of the cookies, and leave the other half plain. Take the plain cookies and coat one side with peanut butter or icing or melted chocolate ... anything that is sticky. Then take a popsicle stick and place it on top of the cookie & peanut butter (or whatever sticky substance you used). Then take a decorated cookie and place it on top of the stick and the other cookie. You now have a festive "cookie sandwich"!

Another great fun snack food that is nutritious and easy for kids to create is "apple smiles". Get some green apples (make sure they're green to keep with the Irish theme), marshmallows, and peanut butter. You can use food coloring to turn the marshmallows yellow and green if you want. Simply slice the apples into wedges and spread peanut butter on one side of each wedge. Then take the marshmallows and line them up on one of the wedges to make them look like teeth. Then take another wedge of apple and put it on top of the marshmallows. Now you have created a cute smiley face mouth with teeth!

I hope these ideas have inspired you to create your own family friendly St. Patrick's Day party! Have a grand time!