Dozens of screaming children running round and round in circles, food lying all over your sofa and carpet and toys and games scattered liberally, like wreckage from a plane crash. Yes, it’s a birthday party! What joy, what thrills - well at least the kids are having a great time!

If this scenario sounds all too familiar, then what you may be lacking is something for the kids to focus on. A lot of people, when planning for a party, consider things like decorations and food but there’s an important element which is sometimes overlooked

Music For Children’s Parties

Sound is as important to children as vision and if you spend some time planning some audio based activities, then you’ll be sure to keep the little ones entertained enough to avoid having your home furnishing subject to every known type of food and felt-tip pen stain known to mankind.

Some things to consider are, how many kids will be at the party and what sort of activities or theme you’re planning on organising the event around.

A good thing to consider is holding some sort of Dance party. This sort of event is easy enough to organise and there are many companies that you can contact to hire a DJ for the day who will play child friendly music and make sure that the kids have a fantastic time.

Organising a Dance Party

This sort of thing would probably be best suited to a party where there are around 20 kids or more and which is hosted in some kind of hall or other external venue. Unless you have a large home, there probably isn’t enough room for the DJ to set up and also have space for the kids to jump and dance around.

A Dance Party DJ will typically play a set of popular child-friendly chart music (no distasteful lyrics) and a selection of traditional party favourites to keep the wee ones amused.

A good DJ will also function as the host for a selection of party games too, mostly involving singing along to the songs or dancing lessons. They’ll know that you’re paying them to tire out the kids at the same time and give you some peace and quiet later on in the day!

When looking around for a DJ, try and choose one that’s fairly reasonably priced. Don’t go for one that seems too cheap, you want to pay for a quality day. An experienced DJ will know exactly what’s required to keep the mood of the day high.

They’ll also arrange things with you so that you know the best time to serve food, tell the kids and parents to turn up - basically, the DJ will also act as a sort of party co-ordinator and you can organise the whole day around him or her, making things so much easier for yourself

Kareoke Fun

If you don’t want to hire anyone else to help with the music, or your house foundations just wouldn’t be able to cope with all that jumping and dancing then you can easily arrange the musical menu for the party yourself.

Here are a few tips to consider when sorting out the tunes for the party

• Create a couple of mix CDs - using a personal home computer fitted out with a CD writer, you can easily create music CDs with a great selection of music. To get hold of the music, you can browse around the internet for sites that offer up free and child-friendly favourites. Here is one site we found which is a great resource for this sort of thingFree Kids Music

  Or, if you want to add some chart topping tunes to your mix, a site like iTunes is your best bet for cheap and easily downloadable music you can add to your CD. Tracks usually start from about 80p each.

  But if you have CDs lying around that contain great danceable tunes, then you can copy music from them onto your new mix CD - Windows Media Player offers great facilities for this, if you’re using a current version of Windows XP then it should guide you through the process easily and with minimal fuss

• Have a look around online in music stores such as Amazon.co.uk where you’ll be able to find compilation albums of really danceable music. Usually, devliery is within only a few days so even if you’re a week away from the party, there’ll still be plenty of time for you to get hold of some decent tunes

Sounds Great

So hopefully that’ll be you sorted for your party sounds. The main thing to remember when choosing birthday party music is that the cheesier and happier the better. You want to try and select tunes which’ll get everyone up on their feet and jumping to the rythym, maybe even yourself!