Ring in the New Year with this family friendly New Years Countdown! Whether you’re counting down to midnight, noon or some other chosen hour, you can build up the anticipation and hand out the fun with this budget-friendly, super-easy to set up countdown! Read on to check out the fun!
THE COUNTDOWN SETUP
The idea is fairly simple – have a bag for every hour (or other interval that suits your adjusted time frame), and add in an activity or just a mini surprise for the kiddos! While you can always just add some inexpensive toys or crafts (think Dollar Store or discounted sections of stores), we like to fill most of our bags with everything needed to complete a New Years activity or craft (coloring hats, making poppers, etc!). This way, you get the kiddos excited about opening a mystery bag, keep them busy with some fun crafts or activities, AND get them to have fun preparing for New Years 🙂 Wins all around!
WHAT’S IN THE BAG??? – THE COUNTDOWN CONTENTS
For our countdown, we had a variety of inexpensive toys or items from the Dollar Store (toy cars, small stuffed animals, but mostly had a few activities planned for them. The excitement of opening up a bag is just as fun as actually playing with or doing the activities inside! Here’s a few of our suggestions:
- New Years Balloon Countdown Setup – While you can definitely purchase a set, a simple balloon countdown is quite easy – pick up some balloons and have your kiddos draw the numbers 1-12 on them. Then arrange it as a clock. Use some construction paper (or poster board) to create the hands.
- Design Your Own New Years Hats – This year, we went with a color your own kit, but you could also pick up some basic, solid colored hats and let the kids get creative with stickers, gems, and markers!
- New Years Confetti Poppers – This is a really easy craft that allows kids to use open ended creativity! All you need is a toilet paper roll, a balloon, and some scrap paper/confetti – for ours, we used washi tape to keep the balloon in place instead of going all out on the decorations. If you need a step by step tutorial, this one comes from raisingveggielovers.com: New Year Confetti Popper Craft
- A New Years Eve Fizzy Sendoff – This one we split into two parts. We’ve posted our step by step instructions here but essentially, it’s the baking soda/vinegar experiment with a New Year’s twist. In one bag, we put the baking soda and colorful crystals. For the last bag (around midnight), we gave them the vinegar – save the fizzy explosion for last 🙂
- Balloons! – This one is pretty simple but requires a bit of lung power! If you’re kids a old enough to blow balloons – let them help! They can even draw or write out “Happy New Year” messages once they’ve been tied up.
- A Journal or Nice Stationary – For this one, we asked the kids to think about their New Year’s Resolutions. Then, they have a nice place to write them out.
- New Years Scavenger Hunt – This one is a nice round-out of the year. Rather than having them just search for items around the house, we had them find items or draw out memories from the previous year. It’s a cute way to recap the year and recall all those memories!
- Noisemakers – We put these in one of the very last bags – after all, you can’t have noisemakers going on all day long!
And that was our New Years countdown! Remember, you don’t have to go all crazy with big or expensive items (after all, they just had Holiday celebrations, right??). What makes this countdown so much fun is the anticipation of opening up a surprise and the activity! Also, while we used some black kraft bags and tissue paper, you can always go an easier, upcycled route and draw on some paper grocery bags – whatever works 🙂
Enjoy!
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you so much for checking out our New Years article. Hopefully this has added to some creative and scientific fun to your day and/or maybe even inspired more ideas! If you liked this article, please comment below or follow us on Pinterest !
If you’re looking for more New Year ideas, check out our other posts here!
Happy New Year!!!
