Hi, J.. We did a Sponge Bob theme for my son's 5th birthday and the kids had a blast! It was May so we didn't get out the sprinkler toy. But we did have his sand and water table out with some cheap little fish and marine mammal toys in it. A really big hit was our "jelly fishing" activity.
We filled a small inflatable wading pool with water and picked up a couple of cheap bug catching nets from the Walmart toy department. Then we took pink balloons and filled them half with water, half with air. Tied them shut and attached an irridescent pink ribbon to the end. Curled the ribbon strands slightly to look like jellyfish tendrils. The balloons would float in the water, but were slightly sunken, bobbing around. (Some had more water than others, to vary their weight.)
We happened to have one of those fishing games, where you "hook" plastic fish with a magnet tipped fishing pole. So we tossed those in as well. And I had a few larger size plastic fish and whales that went in as well.
The kids had a great time fishing for fish and jellyfish. Part of the play was handling the fun squishy jellyfish and tossing them back into the pool.
The only down side? All the kids looked like they had wet their pants! (from the splashing) But they were grinning ear to ear.
We also picked up some bright yellow foam sun visors at Michael's, along with a large container of foam fish/sea life stickers. The kids stuck the foam sticker shapes on the visors to decorate -- and then had a visor to keep the sun out of their face. We also picked up some plain white paper bags, with handles at Michael's (the goody bag size), and let them decorate those with markers and more foam sea life stickers. (The girls got more into this than the boys.) We put each child's name on the bag and they used this at pinata time.
Other activities included pin the jelly fish on Spongebob's net (cheap item bought at party store, but the jelly fish stickers were too small so I printed out larger jelly fish with the computer and put double sided tape on the back). We'd blind fold the kids and spin them around, then aim them toward the game poster with paper jelly fish in hand.
We had a Sponge Bob pinata as well. And a cd of the music soundtrack to the Sponge Bob movie. (Can be used for musical chairs.) This doubled as a gift to my son, as he loves the music.
Also played "Patchy May I", with my poor husband dressed up like a bad imitation of Patchy the Pirate from Sponge Bob. It was patterned after "Mother May I" of course, but when the kids would ask "Patchy, may I take 2 steps forward", etc., my husband would bellow out "I can't HEARRRR you" (like on the show), and they'd have to yell it out. He hammed this up when asking the kids things: "Is everybody ready for cake?" "Aye, aye captain!"
Good grief.
It was fun though!
Btw, I was at Party City the other day and they have lots of Sponge Bob decorations right now. "Scene setters" they call it. Along with tons of luau stuff. (You could combine with J.'s idea, to make it more "girly").
