Kids Programming–Captain Underpants Party

Last year, we were fortunate enough to have Dav Pilkey come to our city to promote the first “Dog Man” book.  Normally we have our author events at the library, but this was so big that we had to host it at the high school auditorium.  It was pretty crazy and the biggest event I ever got to be a part of.  I even got to hug a giant Captain Underpants!!

To celebrate, I hosted a really simple party a week before the event to try and get kids pumped up.  Some of these ideas were taken from other sites so I’ll try to give credit where it’s due.  Started out by handing out nametags and everyone got to change their name using Professor Poopypants’s Name Change-O-Chart.

Then we moved on to the actual party!!

Designer Underwear Competition

Kids loved doing this, and probably could have spent the whole time doing this.  After they were done with their designs, we hung them on a clothesline and judged which ones we thought were the best.  Feel free to use my template.  Thanks to One Little Librarian for this one.

Talking Toilet Toss

I’ve seen a few different designs floating around for Talking Toilets.  Mine is super simple and came out pretty well.  All it is just two large boxes painted white.  Then I got two Styrofoam ice chests from Wal Mart, painted them white to make them match the boxes a bit more, and then hot glued them to my boxes.

The idea was that kids would fling underwear into the mouths of the toilets.  I put them on one end of the room, removed the top of the mouths, and asked kids to see how many each kid could fling into the open mouth.  But when actually doing this, I realized that kids are surprising BAD at flinging underwear!!  Even from a pretty short distance, I don’t think anyone was able to do it.  So what we ended up doing was balling them up, and throwing them into the open mouths.  That didn’t seem nearly as much fun though.  So we moved on to the next game.

Plunger Balance

This was really simple too.  I got a few plungers from the Dollar Store, and we took turns seeing how long we could balance a plunger on our hand.  Kids were a lot better at this one–just keep an eye on your plungers.  I had to separate at least one plunger sword fight.

Captain Underpants Bookmarks

Great idea from Crafts by Amanda.  I prepped a bunch of Popsicle sticks by painting both sides of them peach.  I had the kids draw on their own faces (I made them practice first) and then they drew their own underwear and mouths on card stock and cut those out. We glued everything on and then made capes out of felt.  Really simple.

Design Your Own Flip-O-Rama

Kids had difficulty with this one, but I think it’s kinda important to end on.  It’s what make these books so unique!  I designed this print out to be like a card, the outside would be the index finger part, and the inside would be the thumb part.  That might be confusing since it’s different than how the book does it, but this way is more accurate for how you would actually open a card.  If you printed it out right, it should look like this.

Here’s the template, feel free to use it.  The dimensions are 8.5″ x 11″ so hopefully you won’t have to fool around with it too much to get everything to line up nice and pretty like mine.  You can download a copy here too.

 

My kids didn’t really know what to draw, so I had some old Captain Underpants books they could cut up if they wanted to.  As I’m sure you know, they get beat up pretty fast, so I saved them up for the past couple of months just for this event.  So we spent the rest of the time just working on our flipbooks.

Everyone had a blast, and there was hardly any prep!!

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