Rocket Party ” Daddy & Daughter Date”

I help with a youth group here in my area, a few times a month we have different activities for elementary age girls to participate in. About every 6 months we do a larger activity or party and we usually try to involve the parents.  We knew that we wanted to have some kind of dad and daughter activity this time.  We searched pinterest high and low and couldn’t really find anything that we knew the dads and daughters would really enjoy.   After I had done a few Google searches I finally came across this great idea for a rocket party.  I knew we could take the idea and make it our own!  Years back Avry shared a post on how to make your own pvc pipe rocket launcher.  Avry and I both have one of these rocket launchers so, I already had 2 stations to launch bottle rockets.

I decided to simplify our party by just offering a drink an snack table instead of a full barbeque.  We found the idea to use star crunches, moon pies and the drink labels at catch my party.   I did create my own drink and food labels that you can download here  Rocket treat labels.  One of our other volunteers created these darling starburst treat bags for the girls to take home.

We had the girls create the invitations and decorations with toilet paper rolls that we had saved.  For the invitation they wrapped a fun copy of the details and information around the toilet paper roll, and then created a cone out of a half circle a and glued it on the top of the toilet paper roll. they attached streamers to the inside of the bottom of the toilet paper roll, as if flames were coming out the bottom.  They also use the same idea to create extra rockets that we placed around the bowery on wooden skewers and food tables.

The main part of the party was decorating and launching the rockets.  The girls paired up with their dads and we provided empty 2 liter soda bottles for them to decorate together.  we had a variety of supplies for them to use: decorative duct tape, streamers, foam stickers, scrapbook paper, markers.  Most of them used the duct tape and streamers.  After the bottles were done it was launch time.  These dads and daughters could have gone all night launching rockets, if we would have let them.

We did have more extravagant plans,  it was quite windy that day and so we decided to scale back on our décor and had to tape down everything and find other ways to display the rockets than what we had planned.  In the end I learned that sometimes simple is better, the dads and daughters didn’t notice that anything was missing.  They were just happy to spend time together!