Slumber Party
High School Musical provides a great opportunity for a relatively trouble-free slumber party. Just borrow or rent an LCD projector and a portable movie screen and sack the girls out in front of the movies. With 6 hours of entertainment and counting (as of the writing of this article, High School Musical 1, 2 and 3 are out of DVD), most of them will just fall asleep at some point while watching. The focus on the movies cut down on bickering and other sleepover hijinks. Early in the night, hand out popcorn (microwave movie-style popcorn bags emptied into a bowl works great).
Karaoke
Karaoke is a natural fit for an HSM party. If you have a karaoke machine with a display screen, CD-G disks are available featuring the top hits for all three High School Musical installments. Even if there is no formal karaoke player, most kids know these songs, or at least the tunes, well enough to sing along with a lyrics sheet (easily found online). The regular HSM 1 music CD also contains a couple instrumental-only tracks at the end of the disc.
Karaoke machines are widely available used through venues such as Craigslist or Ebay. A machine can make a great birthday present and then can be used at the party (a review of the one we bought my daughter is linked below). At my daughter's party, we just left the machine out there for the girls to play, or more formal activities can be planned.
Activities and Details
Some other things we did at the party that worked out included putting out the High School Musical 3 Dance Mat that she got for her birthday from an aunt just before the party. The kids loved trying it out. We also bought a Gabriella red dress costume and HSM jammies that we gave her just before the party as a surprise. For the cake, I purchased an HSM rice paper cake decoration from a local cake and candy shop, then added it to a standard plain sheet cake (a lot less expensive than a theme cake from the grocery store).
For party favors, I found High School musical books at the dollar store, along with ballpoint pens with a neck strap and ring stamps. We also found poster books that we used as decorations. My favorite find was HSM themed plastic plates and cups. It was a little pricey, but we got one for each child at the party, and washed the plates in between pizza dinner and cake. Then we gave those to the kids with their favors. It was great to set that sustainable example for the girls. As long as HSM remains a popular theme, the dollar store can be a great resource for inexpensive supplies.
A High School Musical birthday party can be lots of fun, and because it lends itself to lots of engaging activities for the kids, remained pretty drama-free.
Here's an Amazon Listmania list I created with most of the supplies and purchases we made or items we had for the party, as well as a couple other useful items I found. If you want to hunt, a lot of items can also be found at thrift stores and on media swapping sites.
High School Musical Party Supplies at Amazon.com
