Learn with Play at Home: Robot Party

For my son's 4th birthday party, we used a Robot theme, which was a lot of fun to both cater and decorate. So many simple DIY ideas. Here are some pictures from the day.

Our favourite creation was our "Welcome Bot." He was made from some recycled boxes that we collected and then spray painted with silver paint. He certainly made an impact waiting at the front door and as each guest left at the end of the party, we got a photo of them posing with our Welcome Bot which made a lovely keepsake for us at the end of the party. (Note: It's been approximately 7 months since we had this party and our robot is still in one piece in our house! It's been fun adding a Christmas hat at Christmas time, rabbit ears at Easter etc. Who knew having a cardboard robot could be so handy for all occasions?)

Making simple decorations for a robot party was easy. You pretty much just need to add googly eyes and a mouth onto everything and hey presto, simple Robots everywhere!

Hint: Knowing your party's theme as early as possible allows you to keep your eye out for any cheap materials or resources that you come across. A good friend of mine found some robot curtains at a ridiculous reduced rate ($2!) and had to buy them for me. They were used as the backdrops for the party food table and the goody-bag table.

Robot Themed Food

If themed food is your thing but you don't want to spend hours making novelty food, simply displaying regular food in a thematic way and by renaming them can be a really easy option. For this party I bought a range of different sized foil trays and arranged them into a large robot shape. From head to toe we had:

Nuts & Bolts (Crispy addictive Aussie snack. I use this recipe to make mine but with curry powder instead of the lemon pepper)
Robo Rolls (sausage rolls)
Spring Rods (spring rolls)
Pizza Cogs (pizza wheels. Puff pastry spread with pizza ingredients, rolled, cut into wheels and baked)
Microchips (Grain Waves and ruffled potato chips)
Cheesy Ball Bearings (cheese and bacon balls)

As I was having a few guests who only eat Gluten Free, I also made a little Gluten Free Bot with specific gluten free savoury snacks.

I made these little cupcake toppers using a circle cutter, corrugated cardboard in silver and red and a packet of robot stickers.
Instead of regular cupcake liners, I kept with the theme and used little foil cups to pop the cupcakes in instead.

Other Sweets Included:

"Wires" (Red licorice)
"Battery Cells" (I used sprinkle covered chocolate buttons but there are a number of different lollies you could use instead. Licorice bullets would be good too)
"LEDs" (Coloured jubes)
Chocolate Bots (which were made simply from melting chocolate into a cheap robot mould.)

The Fruit-bot was a favourite of mine to make. A hollowed out watermelon full of fruit salad for the body and half a pineapple for the head. Nuts and bolts screwed into the watermelon made great arms and legs.

The Robot Cake

"I want an ice-cream and icy-pole robot cake"
"Ooooook!"

The brief for this cake came from the birthday boy himself and I wasn't sure how or if it would actually eventuate. The cake was probably my biggest triumph as it first seemed like an impossible task but all came together well on the day. The biggest challenge was not being able to assemble it until right before serving, so it wasn't until then that I actually knew what it was going to look like. I knew what I hoped it would look like but I couldn't be sure of the end result.

To make the cake I crushed up a whole lot of different lollies and chocolates and mixed them into vanilla ice cream. I put the mixed ice-cream into two square tins lined in plastic wrap and crossed my fingers that it would work. I used some fondant to make some decorations for the robot and then quickly placed it all together, with icy poles for arms and legs, onto a foil covered board, right before serving. I thought he looked pretty cute in end. (Note: If you're having icypoles, be sure to have enough for all kids as most of them will want one!)

Activities

I'm not really a fan of having many activities that require a lot of structure or organisation during the party, but instead like to have a number of open-ended, more independent activities available that children can come and go from as they please. For this party I set up:

Robot Bowling (using a cheap set I bought, or alternatively you could make your own from recycled bottles or boxes)
Robot Colouring (I printed off a bunch of different robot designs found via a quick Google search and provided them with various colouring materials)
Build-A-Robot (using our Fort Magic set, children were encouraged to build their own robots. You could do this same activity using recycled materials instead)
Robot Dance-off (this was the one organised activity where the kids played "statues" to funky music. All dancing was in Robot style (naturally!) and when the music was paused, the robots had to freeze. As each robot went out, they chose a little gift from our party box and the last "robots" left in won a prize of a build-your-own wind-up robot.)

Take Home Gifts

For the take-home gifts, I gave each child a mason jar glass "robot head" filled with bits and bobs. I try not to send too much candy home as there's usually plenty of sweets consumed at the party itself. I found that the $2 shops tended to have plenty of little robot themed goodies.