March 22, 2014

Minecraft Party for my 9 Year Old

Completing our trio of parties last weekend was a Minecraft Party for Joshua who had turned 9 several months before. All of my kids have been Minecraft obsessed for the last few months. We only have the pocket version on our iPads, but that's sufficient for them to be hooked.


Coloring or craft activities are great for getting a party started as the guests arrived. I googled "minecraft coloring page" and Joshua picked out a picture to print and color for the party. The boys also wrote their names on a paper bag to collect their loot in. 

silly Joshua missed the pig on purpose

We started with a rousing game of "Pin the tail on the Pig". It probably would've been wise to skip this game when I realized we had 10 boys coming to the party (12 when you include the little brothers) because it took soooooo long to give everyone a turn. This was Joshua's idea though, so we went with it. 


Next came our mining game. The boys got really excited about this game. It also took a long time with so many boys participating. 

Any kind of cubes will work for this game. I had some foam cubes that also double as math manipulatives in our homeschool. I cut out little pictures of minecraft elements that are found while mining in the game. I made 12 each of 5 different elements: coal, diamond, iron, redstone, and gold. Joshua taped them to the foam cubes. I stacked them up with other non-marked cubes to make a pyramid of sorts. (I tried creating a document to share the images, but couldn't get it to work. Sorry. Just google the images and resize on your own document.)


 The boys took turns "mining". The first round we let them choose 4 blocks and see if they found anything. In subsequent rounds, we increased the number they could take since it was taking longer than anticipated. Once they had found 4 items, they were done mining and just watched the other boys take turns. At the end they turned in their elements for candy which they put in their party bags. Some boys tried trading with each other if they had all of one element and wanted a bit of diversity. We had bought gold coins for the gold and red Lifesavers for the redstone. We had blue sixlets for diamond, black sixlets for coal, and gray sixlets for iron. (did you know you can buy packs of one color sixlets? I didn't.)


After we mined, we went down to the basement to fight creepers. I had strung up creeper faces across the room that had point values assigned to them. The boys went 2 at a time trying to hit them with dodgeballs and adding up their totals to see who could get the most points. We gave them 3 shots each. I don't have a picture of the creepers hanging up for some reason. I guess I need to be a bit more specific with my photographer (aka husband). (Just kidding! You did a great job taking pictures sweetheart! You're the best!)


We then took down the creepers and split the boys into two teams to play some dodgeball. I think we said that one team were skeletons and the others were Steves and they were attacking each other, but really we just wanted to have some playing dodgeball so we made it work.  

dodgeball is serious business


After cupcakes and ice cream, parents came to take their boys home. Joshua said his favorite part of the party was the mining game and the dodgeball and he was a happy boy.  And I was a happy mom to be done with parties for a while. 










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