Kidding Around: Elephant and Piggie Party

A new book in the "Elephant and Piggie" series was recently released. In my Mo Willems worshiping brain this meant one thing: We needed to have an Elephant and Piggie Party!

Registration issues and scheduling conflicts meant I couldn't hold this party quite as early as I would have liked, so I was especially anxious to celebrate with the kids. It was very appropriate that the title of the new "Elephant and Piggie" book is "Waiting is Not Easy".

When the day finally arrived, I think this program went really well. I had 12 K-2nd grade kids attend, which is our standard registration limit for my monthly programs for that age group. Everyone seemed to have a great time.

Here's what we did:

I started out by reading "Waiting is Not Easy". The basis of the book is that Piggie has a surprise for Gerald the Elephant. Gerald must wait for the surprise, which is revealed at the very end of the book. As I read the story I prompted the kids to guess what the surprise was. Because the surprise is so awesome I will make you go get the book to find out what it is. No spoilers here!

Our next activity was an Elephant Race. I modified the ideas from this party game site. I broke the kids into two teams and we did a relay race. Each team was given a beach ball and had to use their arms as "trunks" to push it across the room.

Next we did Elephant and Piggie Picture Bingo. I used a picture bingo generator to create picture bingo cards using clip art related to Elephant and Piggie book. For instance, in one book Elephant and Piggie make a reader say "BANANA", so I used a picture of a banana.

Like most of my programs this one finished up with a craft and a snack. Our craft was Elephant and Piggie paper bag puppets. I used patterns found on The Dilley Dally for Elephant and Piggies faces. For some reason the Elephant Template wasn't showing up, so I had to copy and paste to create my own copy.

Here's an example of the end result:

For snack we had cupcakes with pink and blue frosting, fruit snacks and blue Hawaiian Punch (aka Elephant Juice).

While finishing their snacks, the kids could peruse the other Elephant and Piggie books.

Feel free to use my ideas for your own Elephant and Piggie Party. For even more book character party ideas check out this wonderful Book Character Parties Roundup by Jbrary. Thanks for reading!