When entertaining a crowd few things break the ice and bring life to the party like a few cans of silly string placed in active hands.
Inexpensive and versatile, you can use silly string in pretty much every phase and activity during your party.
One terrific feature of silly string is the fact that it comes in all the colors of the rainbow.
The sheer amount of color allows you to use many colors or in bulk, narrowed down to just one or a couple to support a more color specific theme.
For instance, you could use all available colors for a school or party theme having to do with rainbows.
Another great place to incorporate many colors would be while teaching a lesson on color.
With both primary and secondary colors on hand, have the class participate by spraying the right color in answer to a question.
You could ask many different questions, such as what secondary color blue and red make.
To get this right, a purple can of silly string would need to be sprayed.
Next you might ask what color was complementary purple, to which the answer would be yellow.
You could go on and on, until your class had both thoroughly enjoyed themselves and thoroughly learned their basic color wheel.
Another artsy idea for using multiple colors of silly string is to do a large paint by number on a lawn, patio, or driveway.
To draw the outline and the numbers on the lawn you could use spray paint, tape for the patio, and sidewalk chalk for the driveway or other cement surface.
The internet is full of free and simple paint by number scenes you can easily print and enlarge to a good party size.
For accuracy you might want to draw a grid onto both the picture you will be duplicating larger as well as the surface you will be placing the large picture on.
Just be sure your numbering on the grid is correct and the proportions should be fairly correct.
Depending on the age of your artists, you may want to color the picture you used to draw the large reproduction from and show it to them before starting with the silly string on the picture so that they have some idea of how it ought to turn out.
Also, to keep from having too much confusion, label the number corresponding to the color on each can and give each participant their own can or cans so that no one person monopolizes the activity be being the quickest to grab every can.