There was a booth with information about dinosaurs, and Elora loved it. She asked tons of really good questions, looked at a variety of fossils and pictures, and we all learned a lot. The man there was really knowledgeable and good with kids, so that was awesome. Here is Elora posing with a femur bone from a dinosaur to try and figure out how tall the dinosaur was – it came from T-Rex’s cousin (basically a T-Rex, but it was found in Utah and had a slightly different skull shape, but I can’t recall the name of the dino). Looks like that was a pretty tall dinosaur.
Marion found this little creature – it is like a baby squid with a shell. There were some fossils of the shells of these little creatures. Since Marion LOVES octopi, this was her favorite part of the fossil exhibit. She could have stayed there all day with her new octopus friend.
Elora learning about different kinds of teeth. Some had serrated edges and some were blunt for crushing nuts and thick plants.
We learned about the mega crocodile that was bigger than the dinos and ate dinosaurs. The kids thought that was pretty awesome.
Marion and Oliver pretending to get bit by the triceratops. Don’t worry kids, those dinos only ate plants, not hands.
There was a little digging game where the kids could find eggs and baby dinosaurs. Marion LOVED this game and came back over and over. She didn’t even really want the prizes, she just liked digging them up. I think she ended up putting most of her prizes back.
We found these fun cut outs to pose in. Marion figured that dinosaurs are pretty serious stuff, so she made this cute serious pose in every single picture I took. So funny.
Oliver had a great time posing! He wanted to pose over and over with silly faces.
The kids all got to make a free dinosaur mask. Oliver picked a scary one.
He was excited to find some cool feathers to add to his mask. Marion was very serious about her mask making.
Elora LOVED making her mask and she wore it the rest of the day (and many days since then!)
There were some inflatables and I told the kids they could all pick one. Oliver picked the huge slide, climbed all the way to the top and then cried because it looked too scary. The line behind him was getting longer and I was trying to coax him down… finally the guy who worked there said I could go up and get him. He LOVED going down the slide with me, and even went back up for his second turn (as long as I would come). Thank you inflatable worker man for letting me go up for free! Silly Oliver.
Elora picked the obstacle course and had a great time going through it.
Since Grandpa likes to keep the kids happy he bought them all more tickets so they could go in the bounce house. Marion had a rough time for her first go round (too many big kids!) so I had her go in with Oliver and she loved it and didn’t want to leave.
There was a display table with information about the National Monuments and Parks in the area – with a bucket of small dinos that the kids could take one for free. Marion took a bunch of dinos out of the bucket and placed them all on the map. She stood there playing with them for a long time and kept coming back over and over to play some more. Oliver decided to come smack the dinosaurs with a balloon that he had won and unfortunately hit a stegosaurus – poor balloon! And poor Oliver got scared and cried until I found him another balloon. Then he made me come over and show him with dino had popped his balloon. We all learned an important lesson – don’t mess with the stegosaurus! They may eat plants, but they are still pretty tough.
James came over to the dinosaur dig and decided he loved it too. He spent most of his time here with Grandpa. He eventually crawled into the sandbox and plopped himself down in the middle with a shovel and started digging there. We let him play until some kids came who actually wanted to dig for prizes…
Elora wanted to enter the coloring contest. She told me she colored her dinosaur the best she had ever colored and we just found out that she won a prize for second place in her age group! Great job Elora! This was a small little festival, but the kids had a great time and it was fun to go somewhere new.
Thank you so much for your kind words about our event! We just finished our 3rd year and are having some growing pains, which is a good thing. We have a facebook page at bigwaterdinosaurfestival so drop by any time. I am going to love sharing your post with our board :))