opening this giant surprise ball was one of the activities we planned for asher's birthday party. the children passed it around on the bus and took turns unwrapping one prize at a time.
i wasn't sure how much time i would need to fill or how quickly the children would get through it, so i decided to err on the side of ginormous. i used 2 packages of red crepe paper streamers (about 150 yards total) and wrapped up a total of 75 prizes (15 each for 5 children).
the process was pretty easy. we cut the streamers into 36" lengths and then started wrapping and wrapping and wrapping. towards the end, as the size of the ball reached past grapefruit size, we switched to 48" lengths, and that was good.
the one minorly complicated part of the process was making sure the prizes were evenly distributed throughout the ball so that each child got one or more of each (i doubled and tripled up on some of the prizes like pennies, gum, and stickers). i sort of failed miserably at that, actually, but the children were good about trading with each other so it wasn't too big of a deal.
for the prizes--aside from the candy, i tried to mostly use stuff we already had on hand (or could make from what we had on hand) around the house:
- bubble gum
- pennies
- googly eyes
- stickers
- wrapped candy
- modeling clay
- magnets
- homemade bracelets
- homemade mustache pins
but there are so many more fun things we thought of including and didn't. (plastic animals, finger puppets, chocolate coins, and basically anything in miniature...)
have you ever made a surprise ball? what kind of prizes did you use?
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