Hawaiian Luau

Invitations: Graphics of palm trees, hula dancer etc. On front~ Your invited to join "name of child" in her beautiful island hideaway for a Hawaiian Birthday Luau Inside~ Island Location: street address Date: Time: RSVP: Find each child's Hawaiian name and print it in the invitation with the meaning.  You could also have name tags with their Hawaiian name. Try this web site for names: Find Your Hawaiian Name

Aloha Platter   Tiki Time

Message in a Bottle:

Decorations:
For tables make them low using bricks and plywood.  Find cushions or mats for the kids to sit on.  Decorate with lots of plants and flowers.  Set up tiki torches outside.  Use pineapples and/or coconuts on the table.  Hollow the out and fill with exotic or other flowers.  Find paper palm trees and volcano to decorate tables.  Draw a large palm tree on butcher paper.  Or make one...get an empty carpet rolls from a furniture store. Place each roll in a bucket of sand, then add green construction paper leaves or get some large leaves from the woods. Tape or staple to top of the roll. This makes a great palm tree.  Take pictures of the kids "underneath".  Also get left over flowers from a flower shop to make leis. For table decorations, we put tea candles in the middle of small paper plates, and hot glued shells and flowers around the plates.  For homemade coconuts, use brown lunch bags stuffed with newspaper.
Lots of Hawaiian music.  Cover your front door with bulletin paper.  Make construction palm trees with each guests name on them. Down the center of the door use construction paper letters to spell Aloha.

Surfboards & palm trees cut from large cardboard boxes and painted

Cake and Food:
Cake:  Pineapple upside down cake
Or any cake with palm trees, hula dancers on it.  You can make an island cake by baking a sheet cake and one small oblong thin cake.  Frost the sheet cake blue, set on the oblong cake and frost it brown and green for an island.  Decorate with palm trees, etc.

Volcano Cake:  Make a bundt cake.   Frost like a volcano and place dry ice in the center before serving.

Serve:
Watermelon with melon balls and pineapple chunks inside.
For punch have Hawaiian Punch and Seven-Up mix, or a slushie. Serve in hollowed out pineapples (can put a plastic cup inside) for small parties or oranges for large parties, garnish with an umbrella.
Semi freeze a bowl of water.  Before solid, stick in mini palm trees, hula and Hawaiian figures.  Place in punch when solid for an island (by Tracy Miller).

Hawaiian Smoothie's:  Gather together a lot of assorted sodas, juices, milks, fruit, and flavored yogurts, and have a smoothie making activity? Each guest can choose what they want to put in their "Hawaiian Smoothie" and take turns using the blender. Then, they can pour them into tall glasses with colorful straws*, drink parasols, wedges of fruit, etc.

Skewered chicken and pineapple (teriyaki chicken sticks in the frozen food section work well)

Another idea is to make up a menu, in Hawaiian, of the foods you will serve.  Use the Dictionary at Hisurf's Internet Island! Let the kids order everything from their silverware to food...they will have no idea what they are getting!

Goodie Bag:
Grass skirts, leis, sunglasses, sunblock, etc.
To Make Grass Skirts:  Purchase trash bags with drawstrings.  Cut off bottom, cut slits up near drawstring.
 OR  purchase a green plastic table skirt at a party store...it has a built in waistline. One table skirt made 6 skirts easily for about $5. We measured my daughter's waist and cut out skirts for all the girls and cut them into strips right up to the waistline. It went pretty quick. The scissors zip through that plastic pretty quick. Then we put velcro strips at the waist to take the skirts on and off. they were a huge hit. 
For the boys-straw hats.

Games and Activities:
1.  Make a tiki gods out of toilet paper tubes. Let the kids decorate them with markers/stickers.

2.  Make palm trees using rolled up brown paper and add leaves using green construction paper.

3.  Give each guest a lei and a kiss. They also can put a flower behind their ear. Left side means married. Right side means single.

4.  Coconut relay:  Roll the coconut with a broom from one area to another and back.

5.  Obstacle course, set up kiddy pools (hot coals), walk on a board, eat a fireball or sourball at the end (fire-eater) and other obstacles you can find.  Walking across stepping stones. (shark pit) have to stay on the rocks or the sharks will get them. Lava pit- put a gray dropcloth under a swing and they have to swing over the "hot lava" and drop without touching it. 
Cave - make out of a giant box and have one of the older kids act like a monster at the cave.

6.  A hula contest.  See who can do the best, give prizes.  Maybe a prize for each participant based on a special quality they give to the dance.

7.  Play a rendition of musical chairs...Musical Island, made with paper or paper plated hand decorated with fish cover with contact paper to make more durable.

8.  On butcher paper, draw a tropical scene.  Let the kids
color and draw themselves into the scene.

9.  Limbo (or water limbo, under a stream of water from the hose).  Look for other water games under the "Water Blast party"

10.  Make flower leis.  Cut a simple flower pattern from different colors of construction paper, tissue paper, or crepe paper.   Punch a hole in the center of each flower.  String the flowers onto yarn necklaces, using cut-up straws as spacers. 

11.  Pin the palm tree on Hawaii using a world map. 

A Rainy Day Luau - idea provided by Jo

Welcome To Our Rainy Day Luau!

 Luau is another name for party in Hawaii.  During a luau there are activities for you to do.   Please read the list with Mom below and try some of the them!   We’ll have a special hula after the cake and ice-cream.

EXPLORE THE GLOBE  (barn with table)            
See if you can look at a globe which is a model of our planet Earth.  I bet you and  Mom can find the islands that make up the state of Hawaii.  There are seven  islands all together.  They are Ni’ihau, Kaua’i, O’ahu, Molaka’i, Maui, Lana’i and The Big Island. 

CATCH THAT WAVE   (dining room)           
In the dining room there is a bubble center for you to blow the biggest bubble you can!!
Hawaii can have waves bigger than a school bus.. and swimmers actually ride or slide down the wave on their surf boards.  I bet you have seen pictures of that before!!!
There is a man named Don Ho who likes to sing a  song called Tiny Bubbles.  See if you can make your own bubbles.

EXPLORE THE TIKI HUT (Red Room/Den)           
A tiki hut is house in Hawaii. You can play house in the red room using the  dollhouse, play kitchen, or the play food.  

MOLD A VOLCANO DUDE (Gold living room)          
 In Hawaii they call a Volcano, Pele, which means fire.  See if you can use the play-dough on the living room bench to make the coolest volcano you can.

BIKE DOWN A VOLCANO (outside garage)         
In Hawaii you can ride a bike down a real volcano crater.  You can do this because the volcano is dormant… that means that there is no fire/lava left so you can not get burned.  The volcano looks like a giant moon with sand and craters when it is dormant.  See if you can pretend you are biking down a huge volcano!

PAINT A WATERFALL (small outside barn)        
In Hawaii many artist like to paint the beautiful scenery there.  They paint pictures of palm trees and beautiful flowers that smell wonderful. They even paint whales they see swimming in the ocean.   They especially like to paint huge waterfalls that can be larger than even your house. Can you believe it?   (smocks on hooks)

READ AT THE BEACH (living room)          
At the beach you can bring books and lay on your beach towel and read. In the living room there is a beach blanket for you to sit on and read some books with Mom. Don’t forget to put your sunscreen on for protection! 

DRIVE THE  ROAD TO HANA (laundry room)          
The island of Maui has this tricky road and it is called the road to Hana.  Hana is a little town at the end of the road where people like to visit.   The road to Hana is very twisty and turny and you have to be very careful. There are wild boars (pigs) that cross the roads and huge waterfalls that can splash on your car.   There are rainforests too and huge tree vines can cover the road so you feel like you are in a big tunnel. It is very cool! 

ALOHA WEAR- PATTERN ME BEAUTIFUL (kitchen table)          
Aloha-wear means dress for play with colorful patterns.  People like to dress for a Luau in colorful clothes.  See if you can use the pattern blocks to make a colorful  pattern. Then paste a pattern on a strip of paper using the cut outs

When the Luau treats are about to begin in Hawaii a man dressed in giant grass skirt and a huge hat takes a giant conch shell bigger than your head and blows it.  It makes a huge sound!!!  Then you know you go to your table to eat the treats.  When you hear the giant conch shell or drum you should come to the table with your mom in the barn.  
Mahola!