Games and Activities
Hire a face painter or have an adult paint small dino footprints on the kids’ faces when they first arrive at your party.
After they have their faces painted, let them free play in the dino boxes room (if you have made them already) or give them craft supplies to create their own dinos with the boxes.
The Big Fossil Dig
What you'll need:
- Construction paper
- Pens
- Dinosaur-print wrapping paper, or a camera
- Sandbox or kiddie pool with dirt or sand
- Three kitchen strainers
- About 200 1" plastic dinosaurs
- Plastic Easter eggs
- Light and dark brown water-based latex paint
- Dinosaur stickers
- Dinosaur-shaped candy
- Wood and access to woodworking equipment (optional)
Turn partygoers into junior paleontologists. Bury plastic dinosaurs throughout a backyard sandbox. Have two or three children digging at a time. Give each child a kitchen strainer. Let them find as many "fossils" as they can, but only let them keep two or three. Bury the rest for the next set of kids to find. (For an indoor party, fill a kiddie pool with a few inches of sand or dirt.)
The Dinosaur Egg Hunt. Take standard plastic Easter eggs and paint them in earth tones to simulate dinosaur eggs. Fill the eggs with plastic dinosaurs, dinosaur-shaped candy, or dinosaur stickers. Hide them throughout your yard (or inside for an indoor party) and let the kids go wild hunting for dinosaur eggs. Make sure to pick hiding places that are easy to reach, but still challenging to see.
Which Dino Am I? This activity takes some woodworking skills. Find pictures of dinosaur footprints in a children's encyclopedia or on the Internet. Create a footprint template and cut woodblock sections to match the footprints. Make five different dinosaur footprints large enough to fit a child's foot inside. In your yard, soak ten specific areas with water so that they’re spongy enough to hold a footprint. Take each woodcut and make two footprints throughout the yard for each type of dinosaur. Give each guest a piece of paper with one of the dinosaur footprints on it, and have them find their footprint.
Dino Walk. Have the kids walk on numbered dino footprints while music is playing. Once the music stops, call out a number and the kid on the lucky spot wins a prize!
Dino Beanbag Toss. Make a T-Rex with a large open mouth and have the kids try to toss the bags into the mouth.
Play Dino Charades.
Play Stick the Horn on the Triceratops. Using poster board, draw a big Triceratops with a missing horn.
