A Summer Backyard Camping Party with Free Printables

“This post is sponsored by Sony Pictures in connection with the release of Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.”

During the summer months I'm always on a lookout for easy ideas to keep my kids (and the whole family) busy and entertained. Are you the same?

Even if we plan a vacation trip somewhere, there are those days where I find it quite challenging planning and coming up with a new bucket-list of exciting and fun family adventure to embark upon. 

This is why I'm so excited to kick off our summer this year with a movie + backyard camping party for my whole gang!

School's out for summer and it's great to finally get to spend some quality family time outdoors with my kids!

A movie followed by a backyard campout is a winning combo as far as activities go, not to mention a super easy, affordable and very do-able summertime idea that kids will love! 

For the movie, we can't wait to watch  HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 3: SUMMER VACATION, out on July 13. It's a great film franchise that my kids and I absolutely LOVE (Drac's “Bleh, Bleh, Bleh” has become my signature catchphrase at home...lol), and it's the perfect summer movie to watch with the whole family!

After the movie, I thought it would be awesome to prolong the experience at home with a themed backyard campout, having monster treats and playing monster-themed games!

For our backyard camping party, we carried the movie's summer vacation theme into our décor and food with typical campsite S'mores, refreshing cold drinks and a fun bowling game - but all with a terrific monster twist!

For the snack table I used palm-leaves table mats (a nod to the summer vacation theme of the movie), decorated it with monster-inspired party printables that you can download here, and used plenty of bright decor in a blue, yellow, orange and green summery palette.

For our monster bowling game, I simply wrapped printable monster wrappers (download yours here) around clean, empty food cans (be sure they're safe to use and have no sharp edges!).

It was SO fun to create a campsite S'mores station with “monster treats” (colorful sprinkles, candy eyes and ears) and “monster slime” (green melted chocolate) so the kids could build their own tasty “monster snacks”!

You know you're onto a winner with kids, when food doubles as play! 😉

To wash it all down, I made Drac's Vampire Slushies (raspberry slushies) that the kids customized with edible candy worms, eyeballs and fangs. It was such a winner, even my husband loved it! 

Ingredients: serves 2

2 cups of frozen raspberries

2 cups of ice cubes

fizzy lemonade

½ cup of sugar

Directions:

1) Add raspberries, ice, sugar and 2 cups of lemonade to a blender.

2) Blend until smooth. Add more lemonade if needed to help blend the mixture.

3) Serve at once with edible worms, candy eyes and fangs to your liking!

But of course, no campsite is complete without a fun camping tent! So we put up ours (DIY tutorial for the tent here) and decorated it with colorful, bright paper fans and honeycomb balls to add to the festive summer vibe! 

The tent is the perfect spot to chill out while enjoying all the campsite treats, to take shelter from the sun (so it's very vampire-friendly 😋) and it also doubles as a photo-booth backdrop to help us capture and immortalize those all-important family vacation snaps!

For the photo-booth props, I designed some themed printables with some popular characters and catchphrases from the first and second Hotel Transylvania movies. 

You can download all the photo-booth props along with all the printables I designed and used for this party for free here!

Hope you enjoy these ideas and feel inspired to re-create your own awesome summer movie + backyard campout party this summer!

Click here to check out the official movie site for the Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation – out on July 13th!


PURCHASE TICKETS HERE: http://tickets.hotelt3.com/