Tsum Tsum Party: Games and Activities

Here are some of the activities we carried out at Kate's Tsum Tsum party. There's nothing particularly novel about them - all parties will have some version of these classic activities, adapted to fit their themes. 

The classic ice-breaker/waiting for late-arrivals activity for younger children: coloring sheets.

We drew ours. You're welcome to use them for your parties, or to entertain your small toddlers and preschoolers if you like. You can find the download in this earlier post.

All you need for a coloring activity is something to color with. We picked markers, because as kids get older, they outgrow crayons as a coloring medium of choice, and fork into markers or color pencils. Or sometimes oil pastels. Or maybe that was just me as a kid. 

Before every party, I set the kids the task of culling our huge marker collection. Their job is to test all the markers and toss out the ones that are no good. And by "no good", we mean "if I got that marker, I would be very upset and would want to swop it for another one with more ink."
This year, Emily went one step further and sorted them into colors in plastic cups, and also decorated the cups with color-coded popsicle sticks. It isn't the sort of detail I'd personally pick to add to a party, but if children want to help in ways that are not life-threatening and do not create mess that I need to clean up later, I usually let them.

And guess what? It seems kids like to have their coloring implements organized and sorted into shades and hues. Whoda thought? I thought all children worked out of tubs full of mixed markers, and just used whatever color they fished out at random. 

The next activity was a Pin The Tail On The Donkey variation.  We briefly considered actually keeping the original version as is, since we had an Eeyore Tsum Tsum character, but we eventually went with a stack of three Tsum Tsums. I drew an outline poster and Kate colored it in and added balloons and confetti.

We cut out separate accessories and/or body parts - Donald's hat, Minnie's bow, and Thumper's nose,

which would be affixed in their rightful places with a bit of rolled-up sticky tape on their backs.

Ideally, these were where those stick-ons would go:

It was a lot of fun to watch the kids (who were great sports) try to get it right. It was surprisingly challenging, because there were three different places the various stick-ons needed to go.

Our third activity was a Bingo game. 

I bought the download for $4 here and printed out the calling and game cards at a print shop because our color printer now prints only black-and-white. I also laminated the calling cards just because. 

Incidentally, those little Tsum Tsum heads are the perfect size for cupcake toppers. I printed an extra card,

cut out the heads and laminated them. Just for fun, I cut some out with plastic tails

and some without, which then had to be taped to a toothpick.

Both versions inserted easily into our cupcakes.

Classic party activities for younger kids that you can adapt for any theme, right? 

And now, I'm betting that some of you are wondering about pinatas - this theme would've been perfect for a classic papier mache balloon pinata painted to any of these Tsum Tsum heads. Alas, Kate does not care for pinatas - never has, and probably never will. Too violent, she explains, and also she doesn't get why kids are supposed to enjoy clamoring for candy on the ground. "Why not just give them candy gently and in equitable portions so no one has to fight for it?" was her (less pompous) reasoning.

And so we let it be - her party, her rules :)