Children-Friendly Events

Every child needs the opportunity to engage their inner artist – or just make a colossal mess – and cake decorating can give them the perfect opportunity to experiment with colors, textures, and new tools to design a prized creation. Come prepared with plain cupcakes and equip your guests with decorating tools, icings, sprinkles, chocolate chips, marshmallows, and anything else that would provide a unique color or texture to add to the fun.

Today's activity is actually pretty easy, and frankly, it is just a way for us to show off an amazing idea we found recently! Drawing contests are always fun with the kids at a community because everybody can participate no matter the age and skill level. Plus, it's a cheap option with just some markers, colors, etc. Now, having the drawing be a "contest" can be a bit tricky, because you never want to make the kids feel like they did a bad job, so be careful that you navigate that part carefully. That said, we have found probably the best prize we have ever seen for a drawing contest: You can now have one of the drawings be made into a stuffed animal! We stumbled across this absolutely brilliant website that creates custom stuffed animals based upon the children's drawings! ...

Every little girl wants to be a princess, and this is your opportunity to let her live out her dream for a few hours. Invite girls to come dressed in their best princess costume or party dress and offer a “princess makeover,” complete with a tiara, and then host a small fashion show or photo shoot as the parents cheer their princesses on.

We dressed up our GEM car that is used for tours as an ice cream truck. We had colorful pictures of different types of ice cream and flavors taped to our GEM Car. We made a large ice cream cone with one large scoop of strawberry ice cream and that was on the front of the GEM car. We had nursery ryhmes playing as we drove through our community and invited children and residents to come and enjoy some ice cream. Using the GEM car which is battery operated also saved on the environment and our residents did not have to smell the gas fumes of an old ice cream truck.

Family friendly properties could truly benefit from adopting a practice of hosting what I like to call “Parties with Purpose” especially when it comes to hosting events for children. One of my all time fave summer events is one I like to call The Annual Lemonade Project. This event can take up to about a three to six week commitment but believe it or not it takes very little effort to pull off and gives your residents something special to look forward to year after year. With careful planning, delegation and creativity this will raise the morale within your property for a long time coming. The Lemonade Project is a fun and exciting lesson in entrepreneurship for the children on your property. It is designed to not only get them involved with their neighbors but to teach them lessons about teamwork, creativity, service and more. The objective...