16 years ago a sweet little clown fish, his dad, and their goofy blue friend swam into our lives and hearts and have not diminished in popularity at all. He gave me lots of fun ideas to do with my family and then share it with you!

Movie night doesn’t have to mean staring at a TV all night with no interaction, you can make it so much more with a few activities that the whole family does together. Create memories, encourage laughter, and bond with your littles while you dive into the ocean!

Finding Nemo Family Movie Night

Family Movie Night for us involves the movie, an activity of some sort, a craft, and a snack or themed meal. For decorations, I simply set out some shells, coral, and ocean themed patterned paper underneath our snacks to set the mood. It doesn’t have to be expensive or take hours to set up to create a festive atmosphere that matches your movie theme. Hang green streamers for seaweed and raid the kids toybox for stuffed fish and plastic sea creatures.

Food is one of the easiest ways to give your family movie night a certain tone. For example for Finding Nemo you could serve fish sticks, goldfish, gummy fish, or gummy sharks. You can cut out pancakes, toast, quesadillas, or other soft food out with fish-shaped cookie cutters.  Cut a hot dog into an octopus by cutting the bottom half into eight legs.

As a special treat I made these Finding Nemo Pretzels.

Finding Nemo Pretzel Ingredients:

White chocolate covered pretzels

Candy eyes

Orange wafers

I found everything above at Walmart.

 Finding Nemo Pretzel Directions:

Spread chocolate covered pretzels out on a sheet of wax paper or aluminum foil.

Melt orange wafers in a double boiler- this is simply a glass bowl placed over a pot of simmering water, stir frequently until it’s completely melted.

Use the spatula to drizzle or smooth orange lines across the white chocolate pretzels.

While chocolate is still warm and soft press a candy eye into it.

Add a blob of orange melted chocolate to the back of your Nemo fish making sure that it’s right up against the pretzel drag out to lines with your spoon to create a tail.

How to completely cool and harden before removing from paper.

They were super cute in a mason jar after dinner for our movie snack!

Activity:

To get the wiggles out I like to work in some kind of physical activity before a movie. I came up with “Finding Family”- I cut black paper to fit inside a pair of swimming goggles including the sides and taped inside. We cleared a room and each person took turns wearing the blindfold and searching for other family members in the room. Similar to Marco Polo the person in the blindfold calls out “Finding!” and the rest call out “family!” until the find them amongst the giggles. You can also play this outside or in the pool (paint the inside of a pair of cheap goggles).

This game really helped everyone be able to sit quietly and listen to the movie.

Craft:

For our craft we made a fun decorative banner to hang on the mantle.  We use a few pieces of construction paper, twine, and google eyes.  Cut paper into squares about 6″x6″ then cut diagonally in half to make triangles.  Let the kids tear yellow and orange paper to create Nemo’s stripes and fin and Dory’s tail. Glue on a google eye and tape to string to hang. 

Cute right? The kids had so much fun making these simple decorations!