So for both of my girl's sweet sixteens, I ran party games for them...just like when they were little... The girls were a little nervous about playing silly games but by the end of the party I had teenage boys coming up to me wanting to play more games. The girls still say that their parties were the best of all the sweet 16s they went to....
Games they played included:
Frozen T-Shirt contest: buy a bunch of cheap tshirts, get them wet, fold them, freeze them (separately, don't let the tshirts freeze to each other) then pass out the tshirt slabs.. first one to get the tshirt on is the winner.
Orange relay: put an orange under your chin and pass it from neck to neck all the way down the line.. Preferably they line up boy/girl/boy/girl
The Candy bar game: This is a favorite... you need a hat, two oven mits, a knife and fork, two plates a pair of dice and lots of candy bars...Everyone sits in a circle around a wrapped candybar on a plate. The ovenmitts, hat, and knife and fork are also in the center of the circle. Each person takes turns rolling the dice the second plate, the first person to roll doubles is is "It" the person who is it goes into the circle and puts on the hat and oven mitts and then uses the knife and fork to try to cut the candy bar and eat it.. while the "it" person is doing all of this, the rest of the group continues to pass the plate around and keeps rolling until someone else rolls doubles, when someone gets doubles, they jump up and take the hat off the "it" person and the new person now becomes "it"... once someone takes off your hat, you must immediately put down the fork and knife and give the new it person the oven mits....
As each candybar is eaten, just drop a new one on the plate and allow the play to continue. Remember use wrapped up candy bars, unwrapped ones are too easy.. Also snickers, milkyway, three musketeers worked the best.... I bought a pack of 30 candy bars and the kids would not stop playing until ALL the candy bars were gone! Beware, this game can get very competititive. We found that we needed to use a hat with a pom pom to avoid people getting their hair ripped out when the hat was being yanked off their heads.
Lifesaver contest.. two person teams.. each team gets a pack of lifesavers, one person is the sticker, other person is the stickee.. first team to have all the lifesavers stuck to the stickee's face, wins
photo scavanger hunt.. THe kids have to take pictures of things on the list can be as elaborate or as simple as you want but they create some memorable pics for the kids , many of which found their way into the yearbook (snapping a photo with the police chief while doing bunny ears behind his head comes to mind)
I had bunches of games on hand so any time the party got a little dull or if kids were forming subgroups, I'd start a new game.... I didn't need to use all the games but it was nice to have them ready just in case.... The games were also nice because a lot of the guests didn't know each other since they had friends from church, friends from their old school, friends from their new school, and cousins.
You might even be able to have the DJ run some of the games which might be a little less dorky than the mom running them.. (course my kids and all their friends were dorky so it all worked out for us)
As far as food is concerned, Who doesn't love pizza right? Nacho bar is always fun, and you can't go wrong with a chocolate fountain.. You can get a decent chocolate fountain at places like target or sam's club, and the kids love to dip everything from tortilla chips to cookie dough in the chocolate (I like it too!)
As for decorations, for one of my girls I did kind of like a summer luau theme with pink flamingos and tiki torches everywhere, and for the other girl I did the traditional baloons and streamers....
Also I made sure I took lots and lots of pictures and then made a portable photoalbum that they could take to school and show all their friends. I also took a group picture and made one up for each party guest as their favor. (I just printed out on my home computer and photo paper)
anyway, this is what I did and all the kids loved it and had a great time, but like I said my kids were thankfully dorky goodie-goodies (they were both class officers, NHS members, and the captains of their sports teams... they didn't exactly run with the rowdy crowd)...I hope your event is a success, let us know how it goes
