My 9-year old loves The Amazing Race – he watches and rewatches old seasons; wears an Amazing Race t-shirt; writes lists of the competitors; and has even read a book written by someone on the show. We have even created an Amazing Race adventure on a trip in Northern Indiana. Alex is also my geography lover who knows every country flag, is working on learning world capitals and can identify about 50 countries just from the outline of their borders. I have always opted for kids’ birthday parties at a trampoline park or wall climbing gym versus doing anything at home, but when he asked me for an Amazing Race birthday, I could not refuse his clever request.
I’m no Martha Stewart or Pinterest craft junkie, so I had to keep it simple. I created Alex’s Amazing Race logo and paper for Detours, Road Blocks and Route Information using Canva, the design Web app, but just used plain envelopes. The only other decorations were print outs of flags for the destination countries and an awesome country flag pennant that we already have from Amazon.
Instead of having the kids pair off in teams, I decided to have all of the challenges be things that they could all do individually and at the same time. Even with a team of people: my husband, a friend, and my older son and his buddies, it was hard to keep them on task and together (they are 2nd graders, after all).
We had six fun challenges – plus a big finale. Luckily, we had a beautiful day, as I cannot imagine trying to do any of this in your house!
Our challenges were:
- Visiting Paris, France where they all had to eat a French Madeleine cookie.
- A safari in Tanzania, where they had obstacle races in blow up balls.
- Hanoi, Vietnam where they played the plastic wrap ball game. This is one of our favorites – it’s the one you’ve seen where you get candy and small items (decks of cards, fun pens, chapstick, etc) and wrap them up in one giant plastic wrap ball. You can unroll it and keep what falls out until the person to the left of you rolls a certain number on dice and then you have to pass it on..
- Rome, Italy – where they ate gelato and sang “Happy Birthday”.
- The Island of Tuvalu where they had to find the smiley face cup. I had about 30 paper shot-glass sized cups and drew a smiley face in the bottom of 11 (the number of kids we had) of them. Then I put enough Cheerios and M&Ms (no kids with allergies) to cover the bottoms, and they had to eat until they found a cup with the smiley face.
- Beijing, China, where they had to put together a glow stick craft – a bracelet, necklace or sunglasses.
- The Finale was back to Indianapolis where we held a glow in the dark Easter egg hunt. I’ve been doing these for years and kids love it. There are a few ways to make sure the eggs can be seen at night: you can use glow in the dark eggs; add 2-inch glow sticks (available on Amazon and Oriental Trading Post) to eggs; or use the little flashlight rings (also available on Amazon and OTP) – which make them really easy to see and a great fun item to get from an egg! We used all of the above. My older son and his friends hid the eggs at twilight. As a party-favor and handy egg finding tool, we gave the kids Dollar Store flashlights to seek out their eggs. A HUGE HIT!
There are a ton of other challenge ideas all over Pinterest – many are much more involved, but the ones we used were perfect for 8-year olds. The food ones were really fun and easy!
A couple of things to note: Our party lasted about two and a half hours, which is just about the right amount of time for 11 kids (especially 2nd graders). I would definitely enlist the help of friends, family and/or babysitters to get things ready or to run the games. It’s also why I don’t have many photos – it kept our hands and brains busy keeping these Amazing Racers moving on to their challenges. If you want kids to eat cake, pizza or other snacks, make it part of the destination challenges or eat before you start the Race. They ate pizza prior to starting the Race, and then had the gelato and other treats as the challenges.
The kids absolutely LOVED The Amazing Race birthday party. It’s perfect for wanderlusters and homebodies alike, and now Alex feels like he’s prepared to go do the real one!
