Our Splendiferous, That Means Fabulous, Fancy Nancy Party!

Fancy Nancy is extremely popular at my library. There are usually ZERO books on the shelves, and we're constantly getting requests for them. Naturally, holding a Fancy Nancy party just made sense. Plus, it gave all of us an excuse to dress up and get all fancy!

Getting ready for this program requires some advanced planning. I'm a fan of using as little money as possible since our budget is so tiny. This required me to make some calls to see if we could get donations from the local community. We have to be careful about calling for donations at my library. We use local businesses during our Summer Reading program as well, so we want to make sure we're not asking the same businesses for multiple donations. 

We were fortunate enough to get a local cupcake bakery to donate 36 mini-cupcakes. These looked absolutely tiny when we received them, but they ended up being the perfect size for our little ones! If they were any bigger we would have had to deal with mega sugar-highs.

Once we had the donation secure, we began planning the decorations. This was definitely the most exciting part of the entire process. As you know, Fancy Nancy is a very posh little girl who has exceptional tastes, so we tried to think as fancy- on a budget- as we could. 

We went shopping at our local Dollar Tree and bought all of the tablecloths, utensils, and tiaras. For our signage around the room we used scrapbook paper with fancy words printed on them. We also found pictures of fancy things, such as the Eiffel Tower and backed them with some pink paper.

Our outline for the party was:

• Children arrive and sign the autograph wall and find their seats. We had registration the two weeks before so we made a seating arrangement for the ladies and gentlemen. 
• Once everyone had arrived, we served our fancy lemonade and cupcakes. 
• After everyone had finished we had two lovely volunteers, our children's room assistants who were off that day, agree to be fancified by the kids. We bought all the fancy jewlery and accessories at the Dollar Tree. 



After!



Before...



Once we were done getting fancy, we all practiced walking with books on our heads, and played feather boa limbo. As we were wrapping up the activites we told each participant to stop by our "photo booth" to get their picture taken. We simply took some white poster paper and painted polka dots on it. The frame was a cheap wooden one that we spray painted bright pink. We had each parent sign a release form and posted everyone's picture on our library website. Parents absolutely loved this and I think we will continue to use this idea for sharing pictures.

This program was an absolute blast! We had everyone on our list show up and then some. I hate turning people away, so we planned for about 10 extra people just in case. We even had 2 boys and a dad partipate! Everyone came dressed up in their fanciest clothes and had a fabulous time. The programming on this one can get a little heavy, but it's definitely worth it in the end to see all their smiling faces.