My dino loving boy wanted to do another Jurassic World party. This is just fine with me because we all LOVE dinos now. Normally, I say no repeats for the theme, but its dinosaurs, why not??!! Plus the new movie came out last year (around his birthday), so we could make it slightly different. Plus before he was only 4 years old, so our activities were quite different.
I just make a simple invitation and print at Sams Club. I definitely love using real pictures since my son is all about real dinos not cartoons. I downloaded the Jurassic Park font because let’s me honest it is very fun.
First coming in. I am not a decorator nor do I care about decorations when doing a party, but since we were repeating the theme, I figured I might as well give it a shot. I got some simple brown paper from the painting section of Lowes. I twisted it and cut out some jungle leaves. I stapled the leaves on and a few other parts to make sure it didn’t untwist. I had purchased the big T-rex and raptor plastic balloons as new decoration and to fit more of the Jurassic look. Of course, my son and daughter said they were “so cute!” ha ha ha Yes, they are cute My oldest son had a great idea to play the Jurassic World Theme Park song as kids came into the house. So we did! We just used our Echo.
I rarely do balloons, but I am a sucker when it comes to Jurassic World and dinosaurs. Also did you notice my peeking eye out the window. Just trying to give a little scare.
Since we would be going downstairs which is where the dinosaurs were, I added a sign and some decor down the stairs.
I needed new/different activities from the last party, so I got to thinking. One of my activities did not work out, but I think we were plenty busy.
When they first arrived, I had a coloring page for them to work on while kids trickled in. I like this activity for waiting for everyone to arrive. This way they are not running around crazy waiting. This could be the teacher in me or just a mom who doesn’t love too many kids running around with the possibility of crashing or falling down the stairs.
One of the activities we did was make our own volcano. I hot glued little plastic cups to brown paper plates. Then gave each child a handful of homemade dough. It didn’t require any baking. I recommend putting the food coloring in the water before adding it to the flour/salt mixture. The reason is the dough actually turned brown the 2nd batch. I made 2 batches, but each batch was doubled. Granted, we had a lot of volcanoes to make.
We used my son’s volcano to have an explosion. I just put 2 or 3 TBSP of dyed baking soda. (I had made red baking soda). Then I gave him about 1/4 cup of vinegar. It exploded off the plate and everything, so I am glad we went outside. (With the snow… brrrrr) The kids thought it was so cool. I told them I put the instructions on how to do theirs at home in their goody bag. They were fine with that. Notice each volcano has a dinosaur?? Well, that was the next activity.
The night before the party, I made dinosaur eggs with a baking soda mixture. I did not stress the eggs looking perfect or round. I just wanted to make sure the mini dinosaur was covered. I had just grabbed a Dollar Tree dino pack. They weren’t super small, but bigger than I realized for the eggs. Each child got to pick their dino egg and then pour vinegar to help it dissolve and come out of its egg. The excitement of seeing what kind of dinosaur they got was cute! I had a huge container of vinegar, but I did have a spoon available for the kids to use to help break apart their egg depending how fast they poured the vinegar or how big their egg was. Then they tossed their dinosaur in our sand bucket with some water and washed off their dinosaur. Finally, they put the dinosaur near their volcano to make the volcano a little “cuter”.
Another activity we did was Jurassic World BINGO. I could only find cartoon dinosaurs, which is not of much interest for my kid. So I took the time to make a bunch of Jurassic World BINGO cards. We invited a bunch of kids, so I wanted to make sure we had enough. Took quite awhile, but well worth it. They got a container of rocks to mark them. I told the kids that if they were semi-quiet they could eat their rocks. Some of the kids looked at me with wide-eyes. ha ha ha. Chocolate rocks I got from Winco. I used our T-rex toy as the guard dino till it was time to use them.
A HUGE hit at the party was Dino Stop and Go. We basically just played Red Light/Green Light, but with large toy dinos. We had the colorful smaller dinosaurs from the last party, so I knew I needed to use them. The kids loved playing it and then they played it again at the end of the party while waiting for parents to show up. I had no idea it would be such a hit with as young as 3 to as old as 10.
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We did eat lunch because frankly I just like the whole carnivore or herbivore concept. ha ha ha
I picked some of my son’s favorite veggies and blueberries. Then dinosaur chicken nuggets. I am pretty sure I did mostly the same thing last time, but I knew that I did not need as much food. I made too much food last time and then it got wasted. So I kept it simple, besides we were having cake and ice cream shortly after.
Yes, I added chips too, just because not all kids love veggies like mine.
Onto the cake. I knew I had to do a better cake then the first Jurassic Park cake. On that cake, I just made a simple ganache and put a raptor on it. His favorite dinosaur from that movie was the raptor. But I think I fell in love with the raptors as well.
I wanted to change it up and make it more impressive. ha ha ha So I had to think. I decided to do more volcano activities since that is a sad and important part of the movie #2.
I didn’t go all out on the treat bag like usual, but honestly life has been crazy and I knew they would be taking home their dino and volcano. I did toss in another dinosaur, a glow stick (actually a straw glow stick), some fun candies to fit the theme and a ring pop… which my son loves. I also put in the instructions for the volcano and a pack of Jurassic World stickers. I don’t like to waste money on crappy toys that just end up in the trash. These were all easy and usable.
I did LOVE the goodbye card I added to the black bag. My son thought it was pretty funny as well to congratulate them on escaping. Now that I am looking at the picture of the bags, I should have topped it with some orange/yellow/red tissue paper… just for the volcano look.
The party was a success. My son was happy and the kids all were entertained. I call that a success!
Oh and as a side note, all my kids wore dino attire. I didn’t have fitting clothes at the time (pregnant), but I did make sure I wore my cool dino earrings.
Jurassic World Cake
Go see the awesome Jurassic World Cake!
