We celebrated my son (Troy's) tenth birthday by having a party with the theme, "It's a small world after all".
We live in Turkey and my son attends a local school. He loves his school and friends and so we wanted to involve his classmates in celebrating his birthday. As invitations, I color photocopied the front of an actual plane ticket. Inside the airline ticket, we told his friends we wanted to take them on a trip around the world to visit all the countries where he has lived or visited, giving information about the party. When the children arrived, they handed us their plane ticket. We had made passports ahead of time with their class pictures and information about them. The front of the passport we wrote "International Passport" so all the kids would have the same cover. Each page inside was designated to a country they would visit. After glueing their own picture in their passport, we presented them with a small cardboard suitcase that Troy's grandmother had made for each child. The suitcase had a Russian flight sticker and 'security clearance' glued on the outside photocopied from originals. (The children were able to store their gifts from different countries and place stickers from the different countries on the outside of their suitcase. Some of the girls actually placed their stickers on the country-specific page in their passport.) Upon recieving the case, they took a seat on the airplane. (We set up an imaginary plane with chairs and a middle isle). A friend of mine who used to be a hostess for Turkish Air welcomed the kids and took them through flight safety. The children and parents loved it). I prepared 8 tables. Each table represented a country. I had artifacts from each country on the table, an envelope of stickers and a backdrop with enlarged color photocopied pictures of Troy at memorable places. ie, Troy riding elephants in Thailand, Troy standing in red square in Moscow, Troy petting a young lion in South Africa. Troy was able to describe places where he had lived and visited. After 'landing' the hostess described the country the chilren would visit and as they approached the table, we glued a small flag on the assigned page and stamped "one day visa" in their passport. We asked 3 questions about the country so the kids could learn some geography and history. We then gave them a little momento of each country (ie. a komodo dragon from the visit to Indonesia, a hippo shaped eraser for Africa, and a carpet like book mark for Turkey). For snacks, in Thailand we filled small plastic cups with popcorn and the children ate with chopsticks. They loved this. They had never used chopsticks before. In Australia, the ate cookies cooked in the shape of a boomarang. In the USA they ate small hotdogs and drank lemonade. In Russia, my Russia friend had made Russian pie for the children. For games, we played the Australian hop. We made 2 teams and each team had a balloon between their knees. As the 2 front children started off, they raced hopping to 2 chairs, sat on the balloons and popped them. Then they ran back to the line and tagged the next child in the relay. The kids had so much fun we played this over and over again. In Greece, Troy had riden donkey on one of the Greek islands and so we played pin the tail on the donkey. After "arriving" in Turkey (our final country), we ate birthday cake and Troy opened his presents. The families said over and over that they had never seen anything like this before. Since Troy's school teacher was invited to the party, his school used this theme to let the children 'travel around the world' and bring life to some of their lessons at school the following week. I involved a lot of the parents to help me with "immigration" and passport control, serving and cleaning up. Many times the parents became even more animated than the children. We returned to the 'airlplane only 2 times because it became apparent that it was taking more time to do this. We just regrouped all the children in the middle of the room on a blanket to help direct them to the next country.
