It’s that time of year when you begin to plan your Fourth of July celebration, and you want to include your nieces and nephews in the fun too, of course! Check below for easy, budget-friendly ways to make the Fourth of July full of family fun!

Decorations

Instead of filling vases with flowers, fill them with blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. This is yummy and festive looking. Guests can scoop the berries out and add whipped cream for a truly red, white, and blue treat!

Use different-shaped vases to hold dips and chips as well. These make great centerpieces as well as unique serving dishes.

Mix and match red, white, and blue solid paper ware. Cloth napkins in the same colors would also add an elegant touch.

Roll butcher paper out onto your party table. Scatter red, white, and blue crayons across the table for the kids to color with while eating.

Fill balloons with red, white, and blue crinkled paper. Have the kids pop the balloons for festive explosions of color.

Using pop-cork place mats and attach the kids’ names to the pop corks for easy seating arrangements. The kids can take their pop cork home along with their tags, so use red, white, and blue colors to make them festive.

Sprinkle red, white, and blue confetti and candies around the table.

Activities

Make small U.S. flags and place them into red, white, and blue sand pails that have sand filler at the bottom! Turn this decoration into a game. Divide the kids into two teams and have them run, grab a flag, and quickly walk back to the team line, where the next person must do the same. The team that has all of the flags in hand most quickly wins! Let the kids take the flags home as a goody!

Make a sidewalk chalk mural. Have red, white, and blue sidewalk chalk on hand to give to the kids and let them create their own patriotic mural. They can create an American flag, fireworks, the Washington Monument, etc. This is a great activity for a dry Fourth of July Day!

Boil a dozen eggs and color some red and blue (be sure to keep some white)! Have an Egg Spoon Relay Race. Divide the kids into two teams, and provide each team with a spoon and eggs. The kids must balance a colored egg on their spoon and walk quickly from one end of the yard to the other and return. If the egg drops, the team member must begin again. The first team with all members completing the relay race wins!

For older children, water balloons will be loads of fun. A fun twist on traditional water balloon games is to create a small hole in each balloon, and then fill it with water. Let the kids toss the leaking balloon, which will become a bit of a time bomb as you don’t want to be the last one holding it when it finally runs out of water! Quick, easy, and fun!

Play classic relay races and picnic games, such as ring toss, sack race, and three-legged race.

Have your nieces add red, white, and blue star beads to their shoelaces for added fun.
The kids can make their own creative rockets with cardboard tubes, tin foil, craft paper, tissue paper, glue, markers, ribbon, and child-friendly scissors. 

Tasty Treats

Have a red, white, and blue taste test with the kids. Put out all sorts of foods and spices in a series of small dishes. Blindfold the kids and have the kids taste the foods and spices and guess what they are. Ideas for tasting include salt, ketchup, blueberries, strawberries, French salad dressing, mayonnaise, sponge cake, strawberry jam, pepper jack cheese, beets, tomatoes, garlic, bananas, cherries, etc. 

Freeze blueberries and raspberries in ice cube trays to make star spangled cubes.
Make a rocket pop drink. Fill a glass with ice cubes. Carefully pour cranberry juice, blue Gatorade, and 7-Up into the glass directly over the ice cubes to maintain the patriotic colors.  
Using blackberries, cut up/halved strawberries, and bananas, have the kids create a fruit flag using the fruit pieces. They can place this on a cookie tray, and then you can lay it out to serve to the rest of the guests. The kids can also make mini flags for themselves. You can also provide lollipop sticks to the kids to skewer the fruits with.

Using a star cookie cutter, make up a batch of patriotic gelatin stars, star sugar cookies, cheese slices, and sandwiches filled with cream cheese and blackberry jam.

Make a batch of cupcakes and have the kids frost them and decorate them with red, white, and blue sprinkles.

So much fun for so little money and time. Happy Fourth of July planning, Savvy Auntie!

Photo: maximkabb

Originally published in July 2009 by Lisa Kothari
Republished: June 29, 2017