Dinosaur birthday party ideas - with less plastic!

Anything dinosaur-related is just so popular in my online shop at the moment, so I thought that some of you might find it useful to get some ideas for a successful dinosaur party? I'm not a full on eco-warrior, but I am a Mum (with lots of party organising experience) who wants to help the planet by reducing the amount of plastic we use, so here are some of my best dinosaur party tips -

Decorations

You can easily spend hours searching through Pinterest and making fiddly little decorations to decorate the party room, but the truth is that kids often don’t notice these things and it just adds to the growing ‘to do’ list before the party day. I find that big and bold make the most impact, and you can still get stuck in with a pair of scissors if you want!

Get some crepe streamers, they are easy to get hold of and eco-friendly, plus it goes a long way. Choose greens, blacks and browns for a jungle, prehistoric feel. Add in some big palm leaves cut from brown and green paper to go that step further, you can make those nice and big too.

To decorate the floors, walls and table – I have created a dinosaur footprint template for you to use. Either print directly on to the coloured card and cut it out or use as a template to draw around. If you use brown paper as table covers, green dinosaur footprints down the middle would look really effective.

Games

Classic children's party games are tried and tested, so I find that tweaking them to fit your theme means that everybody knows where they stand as they will recognise what they need to do pretty quickly.

Dinosaur corners – print out 4 different dinosaur pictures and stick them in each corner of the room. Play the music and get the children to dance in the middle but when the music stops, they have to choose a corner to run to. Find a helper who is looking away when the music stops and ask them to say a corner out loud and all of the children in that corner are out. Repeat until only 1 or 2 children are left in and they are the winners.

Pin the horn on the dinosaur – Draw out a simple dinosaur and get your child to colour it in, but don’t draw one of the horns (triceratops would be a good option for this as it has horns on it’s head). Fold a piece of paper into quarters or eights and cut out the shape of a horn, this will give you multiple horns all the same size. Now all you need to do is blindfold the children and use blu tack to stick the horn on to the picture!

Dinosaur egg hunt – Use fillable eggs and add little prizes or sweets and hide them all over the venue. I have the same plastic easter eggs that I have re-used over and over, or you can also get card/papier mache eggs online if you would prefer to avoid the plastic. Set the kids off on a dinosaur egg hunt, but ask them to add them to a big basket at the end so that they can be shared out equally (some children may end up with loads and others with none otherwise).

Pinata – A simple dinosaur egg would be perfect if you wanted a DIY project of papier mache on a balloon, but if that fills you with dread, you can get almost any kind of pinata online now.           Fill it with craft bits (crayon packs etc), paper aeroplanes, sweets or little wooden toys to avoid the plastic tat. It’s so much fun and the children love it. My top tips would be to make sure that the rest of the children are well out of the way, start with the youngest or smallest first and everybody has 2 hits each. When it gets to the bigger kids or older siblings, let them smash away and once it bursts open, they can all dive in to get some goodies.

Party bags

There are so many eco-friendly alternatives if you are creative with the party favours. I found some great dinosaur crayons on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/224300805/dinosaur-shaped-crayons-dinosaur-party?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=dinosaur+cryons&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1&bes=1

That could be paired up with colouring pages. Red Beau also has 2 great options which are the dinosaur scratch art packs and the colour in dinosaur finger puppets. Just check that whatever you buy doesn’t get packaged up in lots of plastic packaging or it completely defeats the point and your efforts to reduce plastic are wasted. All of Red Beau’s packaging is compostable, so don’t worry there. We also have some great paper party bags with personalised stickers, just add cake and you are ready to go!

Thank you so much for reading to the end, I hope you are inspired to create a magical dinosaur party and to help you on your way, here is a free dinosaur party invitation for you to download and print out (personal use only copyright Red Beau 2020).

Danielle @redbeau x