Out of all the themed birthday parties we did over the years, one of the most original and interesting was a Cops and Robbers themed party! We had so much fun gathering costumes from thrift shops and yard sales. One of the costumes was a gangster outfit. Another was a policeman costume. We also had a prison outfit. We made a jail out of a large cardboard box painted black, with bars across a window.
We also created cardboard cars for the car chase. We used computer paper boxes, and we painted one of them green. The other one we wrapped in black butcher paper that I had left over from another project. The top was cut off completely, and the bottom had a circle hole for the kids to fit over their bodies. we hot glued a makeshift steering wheel by placing a Pringles can first against the box, and then attaching a Wii steering wheel to the Pringles can that was hot glued to the front of the box car.
We decorated the dining room with silver and black helium balloons, which we tied to the back of each chair, along with a Happy Birthday sign.
We made a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting with sprinkles. Then we created a white frosting star in the middle of the festive cake, adding small marshmallows to the ends of each of the points of the star. Finally, we added a sherrif badge to the middle. We got a package of sheriff badges from a local party store.
We placed a black sheet over the table and sprinkled silver stars over the cloth, along with the remaining sheriff badges. We also had various other snacks.
After cake and presents, the kids went downstairs to play cops and robbers with their costumes, cardboard cars, cardboard jail, and secret hideout in a closet under the stairs. The kids chased each other for hours and had a great time.
We attached a piece of cardboard painted with chalkboard paint against the wall of the secret hideout under the stairs, to write with chalk all the secret plans. I was inspired with this unique idea from the Wile E Coyote cartoons that I watched when I was a child.
The kids had a hilarious time with this Cops and Robbers themed party!
For more themed birthday ideas we’ve done over the years, check out our 31 Days of Themed Cakes.
I came across some photos the other day of my daughter’s first birthday party. The photos made me smile as I reminisced. We chose a fairy tale theme, and we had so much fun playing games based on nursery rhymes and fairy tales. We made a centerpiece for the table that included pricess slippers, a crown and princess hats, a Mother Goose book, confetti, and the cake topper from my wedding cake that I saved all these years. I used a clean black bed sheet as the table cloth, making a good backdrop for the scene.
We made a simple rectangular cake with a princess figure standing on the top, with a #1 candle beside it. You can also make a castle cake. (If you want to see the spectacular castle cake I made for a medieval party, you can find it in the Treasure Vault. It’s called “Castle Cake,” next to the “Life-Sized Cardboard Castle” under the Middle Ages period of the history section.)
The first game we played was to construct houses made of straw, wood, and bricks. We used pine needles for the straw, popsycle sticks for the wood, and large red Lego bricks for the bricks. The materials were in separate baskets, and we had an indoor sandbox to help the houses to stand up in the sand. You can do this activity outside if you don’t have an indoor sandbox, or you can get some sand in a large bin. When you stab popsycle sticks or pine needles into the sand, they stay upright. Then you can blow on it really hard, and see if the three little pigs’ houses fall over.
Next we played nursery rhyme games like “Ring Around the Rosie” and “London Bridge is Falling Down.” The kids really enjoyed when my husband and I made a bridge with our arms and interlocked hands, as you can see in the picture.
We had a wonderful time with this theme, as we read many famous works of literature (short stories), leading up to the themed party.
If you are homeschooling older kids, you can assign a writing project of a fairy tale newspaper. These were immensely popular when I taught in the classrooms before I had kids. I read to you many articles and funny ads to give examples of ideas for kids to write in their fairy tale newspapers in the audio So Your Son Hates to Write. (The writing assignments work well for girls, too!)
Are you looking to teach your homeschooled kids how to run a home? Today I’m going to show you some of the homemaking materials that we used in our homeschool.
My daughter has been learning more advanced homemaking skills for the past year, as she is more involved in the management of the home. One of the electives for high school is home economics, which includes cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, and taking care of children. When I was gone for several weeks last month, my daughter managed the home perfectly, cooking meals from scratch, keeping up with the laundry, and tidying up the house. I was impressed.
My three sons also learned the basic skills of cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry before going to college, so that they would not squander their money by eating out every meal. They learned a lot of these skills through Cub Scouts when they were younger, including basic sewing skills. So home economics is good for anyone to learn.
We also did Dave Ramsey’s Foundations in Personal Finance: High School Edition for Homeschool. This personal finance course is a one semester high school course that has DVD’s and a workbook, where you learn all the basic financial skills to manage money well, including staying out of debt and budgeting. It goes really well with a homemaking course, since it includes skills needed to run a home.
One of the homemaking materials we loved was The Homemaker’s Journal: Practical Instruction for the Keeper at Home. It’s an online PDF, which we printed and had spiral bound. It’s a simple e-book that has information on how to maintain a home. It’s not curriculum, though. But if it was the only book you had, along with teaching the practical skills beside you, that would be enough for a home economics course. Not everything has to have written tests. PE doesn’t, for example. Most practical skills are learned best through hands-on learning.
However, there is something charming about a proper curriculum for home economics that has vocabulary, instruction, and quizzes and tests on the information. I found that in the Home Economics high school elective from Christian Light Education. There are 10 workbooks that teach all the skills for maintaining a home. We did not do all the workbooks, but instead, we did whatever we wanted. We spent 2-3 hours a day on homemaking this year, and we used a lot of materials, not just this set. So we flipped through the workbooks and did whichever ones we needed. For example, we did not do the health workbook because I had already done a full year of high school health from Apologia several years ago.
We loved the Introduction to the Kitchen workbook from this set. I flip through some of the pages in this video, so that you can see why we liked it:
There are many black and white sketches and illustrations to show hazards in the kitchen, for example. When my daughter tried to pick out the hazards, we were both laughing hysterically because some of the things, she would never have done instinctively, but other things, she was learning for the first time. We had many conversations we would not have had if we had never gone through these homemaking materials.
We also used another e-book called The Kitchen Primer: A First Textbook on Cooking & Keeping a Proper Kitchen by Martha Greene. We liked it a lot, but it is much more expensive than The Homemaker’s Journal, and most of it is recipes. So in the video, I show this, and I explain how you can use a basic Betty Crocker Cookbook as a textbook for cooking and baking.
We also went through a mother-daughter devotional called Beyond Beautiful Girlhood Plus Companion Guide, where we answered the questions aloud instead of writing it down. It took us a full year to get through the book, even though it only has 7 chapters. We did a little bit most mornings before doing anything else. I loved how the questions were often a springboard for deep conversations with my daughter that deepened our mother-daughter bond. And it had to do with homemaking.
I don’t know if I mentioned the fact that we didn’t write in any of the books or workbooks, but that we went through them together. I love the fact that my daughter now knows how to run a home way more effectively than I ever did at her age! My husband snapped a picture of my daughter’s stuffed bell peppers she made from scratch while I was gone on a two-week road trip. I was delighted to come home to a clean house with laundry all caught up and put away. Home economics is definitely worth teaching your teens!
My teen homeschoolers had fun shooting their math books yesterday at the shooting range, culminating in exploding the math books to smithereens. My oldest son said the following quotes before being the first to shoot his math book:
“Pre-calculus took away one year of my life.”
“Pre-calculus is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
“Pre-calculus ruined my life.”
Even though the aforementioned teen got A’s on his pre-calculus, it took him an inordinate amount of time to finish his math each day, cutting into his free time. “Today is payback,” I said, looking in his direction. He grinned as he saw his math book fly up into the air while being shot.
I do need to say that I have been pleased with the homeschooling math books that we’ve used, just in case you figure out what brand of book was exploded by my family. It’s a course that my kids did on the computer, with explanations for higher math that I would never have been able to teach myself, seeing as how I never took pre-calculus in school. My husband thought it would be a good idea to teach our kids to think, hence they were required to go all the way through pre-calculus before they graduated high school.
Obviously my oldest son didn’t appreciate being taught to think in this way, hence his glee at seeing the utter destruction and annihilation of his math book, along with his brothers’ and sister’s math books, which were also demolished.
This was the destruction after the shooting and before the explosions:
Teen Homeschoolers Shoot Math Books (Video)
In this short 1-minute video, you will see the shooting and exploding of math books. We also show the book carnarge: first of the shooting, then of the explosions. Enjoy.
A good time was had by all. For those who have never heard of tennerite, it’s an explosive target that combines oxidizers and a fuel (aluminum powder) that are combined together and mixed right before setting up the target. The two components are stored separately until you are ready to use it. This is what we used for the explosions.
Here is a close-up photo of the utterly demolished homeschool math books after being shot and exploded.
Hope you enjoyed joining us for the demolition of our math books!
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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