Every time one of the kids has a birthday, I always decorate our kitchen wall with balloons and a Happy Birthday sign. It makes the birthday child feel really special, and it makes a festive decoration for the child's birthday party. This year, for 3Po's birthday, I decided to make things a bit more unique. Since he had a Mario Kart Wii-themed party, I turned our kitchen wall into a Mario Kart racetrack. It looked amazing, it was a lot more fun that writing "Happy Birthday" onto a posterboard, and best of all, the whole family got into it and helped. Here's how we did it:
* For the road, get sheets of black construction paper and cut each sheet lengthwise into four strips.
* Cut yellow construction paper into tiny strips and paste them into the middle of the black strips to form lane dividers.
* Use painters tape to stick the road up on the wall. You can arrange the black strips to form several straight roadways, or cut out corners and twisty bits of road from more black paper and use them to connect the straight pieces together.
* Print out Mario Kart characters from the web, color and cut them out, then stick them up at various parts of the road.
* We ran out of black paper for corners, so we had to find a creative way to make the track turn. We made 3 pieces of track meet, and instead of an intersection, we cut out an explosion from yellow and orange paper. Alfie came up with the brilliant idea of adding jagged bits of exploded road.
* If you've run out of black paper to make straight road, you can "extend" the roadway by adding a ramp, or a bridge.
* We made our road turn around the corner, onto another wall, and ended it at a Mario Kart Happy Birthday printout, framed with more track.
The result looked amazing! The kids and Alfie had so much fun planning the layout, and once the party started, all the kids had fun rolling toy motorcycles and race cars along the wall track!
You did a fantastic job! What a great idea.
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