Ninja Night

To balance out the girliness of our Paper Dolls craft, we had Ninja Night at the library a few weeks later.

Our ninjatation, if you will.

First, kids could get into the spirit of things by making their own ninja headband. For this, I bought a jelly roll of white fabric (like these 2.5" white cotton fabric strips) and put out some fabric markers. I was surprised at the time some of the kids spent on these. One little boy even insisted on coloring his headband black, then having his father cut eyeholes in it so it was a mask.

Our other craft was making ninja puppets (tutorial here). Some moms got pretty into the puppets while the kids were beating up the ninja balloons.

On to weapon making. We had an origami shuriken, or paper ninja star, set out with some origami paper, instructions, and a laptop with a video tutorial going on loop. This was definitely too hard for the kids. But they all still wanted one, so it turned into me and some parents churning them out. They are cool, though. If I did this again, I would probably just make up several white ones in advance and let the kids color/decorate them.

We also had DIY nunchucks. One parent told me her son wanted to come specifically for the nunchucks. They are pretty easy to make (tutorial here), and beating up ninja balloons with them were easily the highlight of the night.

They could try out their ninja stars and nunchucks at Ninja Training. Some helium-filled ninja balloons (mixed in with some solid black balloons) were for trying out ninja kicks and nunchucks. I also taped a few non-helium filled from the ceiling, but they didn't last long.

For the ninja stars, I had this game where they could throw their stars to knock the ninja balloons out of the cups. Ninja bowling.

I also had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dvd going on in the background, and I pulled ninja books/movies/games to display for the night.