Party Theme: U.S. Presidents!

Happy 2014!  In honor of our nation's upcoming celebrations of the U.S. presidents, I wanted to share a party idea that may seem a bit unconventional-especially for a child!  My 8-year old son loves the presidents so instead of a character/movie/TV show theme party, we focused on the U.S. presidents.  

Decorations
I was able to use some items from my classroom like red, white and blue bunting and small American flags as decorations.  I also used posters of the presidents that I bought from allposters.com.  I stuck to his favorites (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy and Reagan) and hung them all around the house.  A colleague of mine has a life-size cutout of Andrew Jackson and we placed him right by the front door of the house to greet everyone as they arrived :)  Everyone wore red, white and blue too!

Food
We looked up favorite foods of the presidents to help create our menu.  This was really fun!  Some of the presidents foods we included on the menu were:

Hot dogs-George H.W. Bush
Macaroni and cheese-Ronald Reagan
Nachos and guacamole-Barack Obama
Burgers-Bill Clinton

I made an ice cream sandwich cake and had a local bakery make an edible color copy of my son dressed in a shirt tie.  












We served the ice cream cake and fresh fruit for dessert but also had jelly beans (Reagan's favorite) and chocolates that had wrappers that looked like money.  (Found them at Bed, Bath and Beyond)


Activities
We had pin the hat on Abraham Lincoln.  I also had paper that looked "antique" and a quill pen and ink I had bought at a museum years ago.  Kids were able to dip the pen in ink and write (or draw) on the old paper.  They had lots of fun with that!  The highlight of the party, though, was a visit from President Theodore Roosevelt himself :)