When my son turned 4, he was really obsessed with the Disney Pixar movie Cars." I found some pictures of the characters on the computer and enlarged a picture of Doc Hudson to 400X (it took several pieces of paper pasted together).  Then I took artistic liberties and drew an antenna on Doc Husdon. We played "Pin the Antenna Ball on Doc Hudson." I fut out a bunch of circles out of blue paper and put tape on the back for the antenna balls. Then we played "Mater's Tow Yard." My son knows car parts because of a book he likes to read at night so I found some car parts online and printed them out several times. But if your child doesn't know car parts you could use pictures of whole cars. I put a paper clip on each car part and put them in brown paper lunch bags.  I had a bag full of tires a bag full of bumpers another bag full of axles and so on. Then I took yarn I had lying around the house and cut lengths.  I found some magnets with peel and stick backing for something like 50 cents a foot.  So I attached a piece of magnet on the end of each string. I called the strings the "tow hooks" and had the kids try to get one of each car part by fishing with their tow hooks into the bags. This game was really fun and even though I had a big distribution of ages at the party all the kids enjoyed it and wanted to play it twice.  I ordered scratch pennants from Oriental Trading the kind that are black and you can use a wooden tool to scratch a design into. If you didn't want to purchase these you could cut triangles and use markers. The kids made racing pennants. I ordered a few more than I needed (they only come in dozens) and a few kids didn't show up so I actually had enough for each kid to make two. That worked out nicely.  Then we went outside to play some games.  We played Luigi's Bean Bag Tire Toss.  I cut a large circle out of a box and then cut a smaller circle out of the inside so I was left with an "o" (or a tire).  Then I painted the tire black and tied it to a tree branch.  We used bean bags and tossed them through the "tire." It turned out that I cut the center out too large and every kid got the bean bags through the hole easily.  But then I changed the game and had the kids move back. Some of the older kids had to try to use their other hand and then some were told to try turning around and tossing the bean bag backwards. Then we had a piston cup race. I went to the local office supply store and got some boxes the kind they get reams of paper in.  They were going to throw the boxes away anyway and just gave them to me for free. I thought it was funny because they actually sell the new boxes that are exactly the same in another section of the store but I went to the copy center and they just gave me their used boxes. The paper boxes are nice because they have handles cut into the side. First I cut the bottom out so I was just left with a rectangle.  I painted them up in colors (one was red for Lightning McQueen another was blue for Sally etc.) I painted yellow circles on one side for headlights.  I don't know what it is with kids and boxes but they loved them. We had a Piston Cup race and the kids ran around and around. I had them try running backwards like Mater skipping hopping on one foot and so on. You could probably do the Piston Cup race the same way without the painted boxes but I think the kids enjoyed pretending to be one car or another. I had another game planned called "Sarge Says" that is like Simon Says but the kids liked the other games so much that I ran out of time and didn't get to play Sarge Says.  The cake was simple: I just put little die-cast metal cars (a-la Hotwheels) into the frosting. I bought a few favors from Oriental trading. For lunch we had checkered flag sandwiches.  I bought a loaf of white bread and a loaf of wheat bread. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cut the crusts off.  I arranged them in a light-dark-light checkerboard pattern and called it a checkered flag.  I also had axle dogs (pigs in blankets with the two ends to the dogs sticking out and "Flo's V-8 Cafe Fruit Skewers which were just canned pineapple chunks, maraschino cherries, pieces of canned pear, and orange slices put onto bamboo skewers.  These were really popular.  For punch, I used my favorite and easy birthday punch (juice mixed with lemon lime soda), but you could use any punch. I called it  Filmore's Organic Fuel."  For decorations we used red yellow and blue streamers and print out pictures of the cars in the movies that I got from the internet. The party was so much fun and it was pretty inexpensive because I made a lot of the items myself out of items that were free or nearly free (Luigi's tire the boxes for the Piston Cup race the tow hooks etc.). "