School Supply-Themed Back to School Party

Some of my favorite parties to host aren’t birthday parties at all — they’re parties for special days and milestones. There’s less pressure with these, which means more room to get creative. I’ve thrown a back to school party for my girls every year, including the year they left for college. This summer, Baby B is home, and she’s officially my Party Teacher paraprofessional — so of course we had to celebrate with a back to school party.

We went full elementary-school style with my new back-to-school party printables collection (you can find it in the shop — printing at the UPS store cost about $17).

My party inspiration was straight out of school supply list: composition notebooks, ruled paper, pencils. I wanted this to feel like the party you’d throw the day your child walks off the bus for the first time — sweet treats, a simple table setup, and a place for them to sit with friends and tell you everything about their day.

Shop your house first (then fill in the gaps)

A lot of this party came from my own party stash. I keep a good amount of reusable supplies on hand — melamine plates, trays, paper decor — and I always start there before buying anything new. I grabbed a wood crate and walked through my party supply area with fresh eyes, looking for anything that fit a school-supply color palette (we landed on primary colors). Here’s what I found:

• Yellow melamine plates
• Paper chains
• Two yellow trays left over from our Nancy Drew mystery party
• Little red chalkboards and giant pencils from our Junie B. Jones party
• Yellow paper fans
• Craft-colored scalloped paper placemats from our Christmas cookie decorating party

I did buy a few new pieces to round it out: a chalkboard for the backdrop, flashcards, tablecloth and white cotton napkins.

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The chalkboard backdrop

Our other big inspiration was chalkboard — literally. We used a 24” x 36” chalkboard as our main backdrop, and I chose a charcoal tablecloth to keep that chalkboard feel going across the whole table.

School supplies centerpiece

For the centerpiece, I reused three vases left over from the girls’ high school graduation party. I filled one with grocery store flowers, one with washable markers, and one with rulers, pencils, and crayons. I grounded all three vases on a round tray so the whole thing had a little more presence on the table, then added an apple to one side to finish it off.

Best of all: when you decorate with school supplies, you get to use them later!

Two Easy Back to School Party DIYs

I wanted a couple of simple, doable projects for this one — nothing that would eat up my whole week, but that would scratch that creative itch.

Notebook-paper napkins: You can absolutely buy notebook-paper-striped napkins, but I always love a cloth napkin, so I made my own. I picked up inexpensive white cotton napkins and used fabric markers with a ruler to stripe them like notebook paper. Each napkin took about 4 minutes to make.

Flashcard chair banners: I punched holes in the corners of flashcards and strung them into simple chair banners. Fast, cheap, and exactly on theme.

Painted pencil forks

This was my favorite project of the whole party. I used washi tape (regular masking tape works too) to section off wood forks into pencil segments, then painted each section — using pink, silver, yellow, black acrylic paint— letting each color dry before moving to the next. One safety note: don’t paint too far up the handle, since that’s the part that goes near your kiddo’s mouth.

For drinks, I dressed up the bottles with Scotch ruler masking tape and cursive washi tape I’d bought years ago while back-to-school shopping with the girls — proof that a supply stash is worth holding onto.

The straw flags are from my printables collection.

Each place setting also had a few printables and a pack of crayons to keep guests busy:

• A maze made out of ABCs and 123s
• “This year, I want to…” cards
• A coloring page made up of school supplies

(There’s so much more in the printables collection — we didn’t use even half of it for this party.)

Back to School Party Favors

Favors were simple: composition notebooks from the dollar store, dressed up with a thank-you tag from my printables collection and clipped on with mini alphabet clothespins (Target dollar aisle, a couple seasons back).

Back to School Party Dessert Table

Dessert was the most fun part, hands down. I had the idea to do alphabet cookies, and Baby B — who loves baking and decorating cookies — brought it to life. We used red, yellow, orange, green, and blue Ann Clark gel food coloring to get bold, bright colors. The little dot border Baby B piped around each cookie was all her and so cute!

We also tried candy-covered Oreos for the first time, which was easier than I expected. The one trick: make sure you have enough candy melt pooled in the silicone mold before you press the Oreo down, so the coating comes out even all the way around. (Also: I swear by my Wilton candy melting pot. It’s so much easier than melting candy in the microwave or with a double-boiler and it cleans up like a dream.)

It’s hardly a party without cupcakes, so we added vanilla cupcakes and dressed them up with cupcake toppers from my printables collection.

I also added an apple to the dessert table alongside the two giant pencils and a small red-framed chalkboard. It’s a small thing, but a few well-placed props like that go a long way toward rounding out a dessert table without adding more food or décor.

This party was just plain fun to plan and host, and I hope it gives you a little inspiration as you gear up for your own first day back. I’ll share the individual tutorials — the painted pencil forks and the striped napkins especially — in separate posts soon.