4 Year-old Home Birthday Activities/themes Ideas

We bought the build a bear type animals at a wholesaler online, she had all different kind of animals (we did monkey themed). It was a fun activity for the kids and ended up being their favor as well =) You can look up online wholesalers for the animals I think we paid maybe $6 a piece, then I used 50% off coupons from Michaels to buy the stuffing.

I think for my daughters 4 year old party we are going to do a strawberry shortcake tea party theme, I was going to make little tea sandwiches and tea. Not sure how I am going to incorporate the boys yet, but I still have a little time to figure that out =)

If you need invitations www.WorksofaWink.com

gingerbread houses or people? it's a fun mess!

We did a faux sleepover for that age last year. The kids brought a blanket or Teddy bear and even came in pajamas. I had some basic munchies and turned the movie on. So stress free and easy on everyone! Kids loved it!

We did this last weekend. We spent less than $75 for everything including the cake a food.

1- The food was kept simple and cheap - hot dogs, chips and fruit from Sam's. I made the cake.
2 - The decorations were homemade (blew up the pic on the computer then taped all the paper together, put it on the foam board and traced with a ball point pen, the impression went through. I traced the lines with Sharpie and then painted with paints I had on hand. A projector would have worked great for this). Our theme was Spiderman, so I paid very little for some cool decorations. I bought red and blue balloon and blew them up and threw them on the floor. I didn't want to mess with hanging them from the ceiling and didn't have time to pick up helium balloons. The kids loved playing with them.
3 - My son wanted face painting. Spent $2.50 at Michael's (they cost $5 and I used a 50% off coupon). I am not artist so the face painting choices were simple - balloons, flowers, spiders, etc.Kids LOVED it!!!
4 - Pin the tail on the donkey (our version was pin the mask on Doc OCk using the same trick we used for the decorations). Could be changed to fit almost any theme.
5 - limbo - A lot of our crowd didn't get it, but they had fun anyway
6 - All of our prizes, tables clothes, plates, napkins, etc. came from the Dollar tree.
6- Pinata - doubled as our thank you gift (We gave kids a notepad and crayons (3 for $1 at the Dollar Tree with a thank you for coming message as they left - ONLY because those items would not fit in the pinata). We do not have any trees big enough in our yard for a pinata, so the hubby got creative. He attached the pinata to our pool pol and climbed our tall ladder. He leaned over and held the pinata while the kids whacked at it and another Dad, held the ladder just in case.

Our party went from 11 - 1:30 and it was the perfect amount of time. It was easy and very little stress and kid centered. We heard from a lot of people that it was the best party they had been to in a long time. HTH.

I like Jodi's answer below. What about decorating sugar cookies?
You can buy foam sticker shapes at Michaels and if you do that, you can get Construction Paper and have each person make a winter theme. But at four, I still do not think you have to worry about entertaining that much. Let them run around and play!

For my two year olds birthday party we had an ice cream shop. I made signs on posterboard and cut out some ice cream cones shapes. Then I hung them up and put up some streamers. We had sandwich stuff and chips, and I made brownies for the cake and just wrote her name on top. Then we had all kinds of ice cream and toppings and whipped topping, and everyone made their own sundae, brownie bottom sundae, ice cream cone or whatever. We played pin the cherry on the sundae, guess how many candies were in the jar (winner got the jar of candy) and had a candy walk. I taped numbers written on paper on the floor and they walked around while I played music. Then we drew a number. The winner got to pick a treat from a basket of candy, crackers, nuts, chips, etc. The sundaes were a big hit!