Camping Party

Recently, I had the opportunity to help decorate my kids’ elementary school for their annual dance. This year’s theme was camping/National Parks. Here is how we turned our school into a fun campsite amidst a whimsical forest using simple supplies, little expense, and time. I also made some free printables that are available to download below. Many of these ideas can be used if you are hosting a camping theme birthday or celebrating summer camp. They also may be helpful and fun to decorate a classroom for a unit study on National Parks.

When decorating for the school, I use a lot of butcher paper. It’s big, already there in abundance, and allows me to cover a large space quickly.

The kids started out by helping me to cut and tape up large snow capped mountains that we made from blue and white butcher paper. As you can see we have a really huge space to decorate.

As butcher paper is very thin, I typically will stack 6-8 sheets at a time to quickly cut my silhouettes. I found fun silhouettes here and also through using a general google search and used my projector to enlarge all the images to trace.

My kids repainted these white trees from my daughter’s Winter Wonderland birthday. They used a mix of various shades of green and white acrylic paint.

They had so much fun painting them and they turned out so pretty.

We used the same trees to cut out a whole forest from more butcher paper.

I painted some cardboard signs similar to how we decorated for my daughter’s Matilda Birthday. I also pulled out our large fox from my daughter’s Squishmallow Birthday to add to the scene.

As we are a school in the Pacific Northwest, I thought it would be fun to add a few silhouettes of Bigfoot.

Plastic tablecloths in red and orange were stapled to the wall to create large tents.

Each table was draped with a green plastic tablecloth to simulate grass. I also brought all of our green fabric tablecloths from home so we wouldn’t have to purchase as many plastic tablecloths. Our initial thought was to cover the tables with a cute checkered tablecloth to look like picnic blankets but it ended up being too costly. As a compromise I found these plastic checkered tablecloths and cut them into squares for each table. My daughter helped me to make little campfires to go on top of each table.

These campfires are made from pool noodles and butcher paper. Using a serrated knife, I cut a pool noodle into five pieces. We wrapped each piece in brown butcher paper. We cut another pool noodle into ten pieces and also wrapped each piece in butcher paper. You’ll need to hot glue the pieces together to form a cross.

To create the flames, I cut orange butcher paper into a pointy flower shape then scrunched the bottom and glued it on top of the pool noodle “logs.”

These were really cute on top of all the tables.

I made some camping themed coloring pages. The one pictured above is free to download. I make more coloring pages here that can be personalized.

In the gym, we hired a DJ with black lights. To take advantage of that, we made decorations that would glow. I purchased a black light flashlight to see what kind of material would glow and found that a lot of white cotton fabric as well as white poster board would glow.

I purchased these neon poster board at the Dollar Tree to make more large silhouettes.

I piled 3-4 poster board at a time to cut each image out.

This was a very efficient and affordable way to decorate the large gym.

We used double sided tape to hang each cutout onto the large gym mats and they held up well during the dance. I also found some glow-in-the-dark star streamers here and and glow party streamers here. The butterfly template I used to make these cutouts can be found here.

I made a banner that is free to download above. I make more personalized banners here. The camp signs which can be customized are available here.

These signs are free to download above. We set them on a table to later serve S’mores treat bags for the kids.

I purchased camping themed temporary tattoos here and glow-in-the-dark bug tattoos here. The tattoos sign is free to download above.

It should be noted that this was absolutely a group effort and would not have been possible without many wonderful parents and fellow PTA members. It took many enthusiastic and helpful hands to tape, staple, and string everything up. One mom took butcher paper home and created these whimsical paper flowers to hang all over the school. Another mom purchased these dangling stars, glued constellations on dark blue butcher paper, and purchased this cool camping backdrop below.

The camping backdrop is available here.

I had so much fun helping to bring this theme to life for my kids’ school and received so much positive feedback. The students and their families had a blast with nearly 350 in attendance. Teachers have shared with me fun ways that they want to add to this theme in their classroom for next year as well.

I create more printable activities for kids here.

To see my other parties click here.

If you use these printables or ideas, I would love to see it! Please use #sodangfun on social media, tag me @sodangfun on Instagram, or post to my Facebook page.

I hope this post is helpful in planning your camping themed celebrations and activities!