Elephant and Piggie Party

Even though their are currently no new books, Elephant and Piggie are still huge. Their books are usually always out, and their adventures easily translate into a full-scale program. I modeled this program off of my Dr. Seuss Birthday Party I did years ago–with the first third or so being a storytime, and the second part being station based activities.

Storytime

What’s so great about these stories as that most of them so easily translate into plays. The humor works so well for both kids AND adults, and the lines are easy to remember due to the simple vocabulary. During quarantine, my wife and I did a whole bunch of Elephant and Piggie videos for an online audience–it was the inspiration to eventually do a program between our two libraries.

So the books we did for our program were, “Let’s Go for a Drive!”, “My Friend is Sad,” and “There is a Bird on Your Head!” You can watch our other videos here to kinda see some of our blocking–again it translates really easily to a stage.

We set up a simple stage, using a camera backdrop as a curtain. We chose orange so it would kind of look like one of the book covers. On the sides were the characters–I’ll go over how I made the giant cutouts and other characters in another blog entry 🙂

Each story has about a 5 minutes runtime, which is why we did three of them. After, we had everyone break out into our stations. Before I talk about that, wanted to share the the promo photos my wife and I did for our event:

Character Meet and Greet

Costume Specialists is a really good company to work with. I did my Pete the Cat Party through them and had no problems getting the costume early and were in great condition. And we technically didn’t pay for them, we just paid for shipping the huge crates. I would say that max time for people in the costume seems to be about 20 minutes before the people inside start to get overheated, so have a staging area for breaks. Because they will get SWAMPED by kiddos. I had kids that wanted books signed and wanted to give pictures to them 🙂 So anyway, figure out where they can go to cool off before the event.

Games

“There is a Bird on Your Head” Balance Challenge

I saw this on a few different blogs, and it’s definitely a great idea. I bought a stuffed nest on Amazon, and put some egg shakers in it. Kids would balance the nest on their head and walk around an obstacle course circle. A balance beam, a hopscotch ladder, some stepping stones–things like that. Lots of fun, but next time I would get more than one nest to make the line go faster.

“Watch Me Throw the Ball” Bean Bag Toss

Simple but was a hit. Had the kids try to get beanbags into the buckets I made. BUT Piggie is bad at throwing, so they had to throw it BACKWARDS! Bought the 5-gallon buckets on Amazon, and just added some eyes for the effect–easy!!

I got the pink 5-gallon pails off of Amazon. I’ll attach my face template here.

“I Will Surprise My Friend” Scavenger Hunt

Everyone loves a scavenger hunt, and what’s so great about this series is that SO many of the books work very well with standard party games. So I redrew Elephant and Piggie from the book cover and hid them around the library. I reached out to Mo Willems’ site to see if I can distribute this to you all for free, so I’ll update this post and upload it if given permission.

Crafts and Other Activities

“I Broke My Trunk” Party Blower

Really simple craft! Just a picture of Gerald with a party blower. But it’s a lot of fun to have a bunch of kiddos walk around your event with party blowers going off every which way.

Same thing–submitted this to Mo Willems’s site to see if I can distribute it for free. I’ll update it if and when I hear back.

“Invited to a Party” Photo Booth

Photo booths are so great–it’s a designated and cultivated spot for people to take photos and make memories, and hopefully tag you in them. But if you have someone stationed there to take photos, you just instantly have a million photos of your event!! For this part, we just used our stage backdrop, so it was perfect to transition to a photo booth backdrop.