Dino Dig
For my 4 year old son's birthday, he wanted a dinosaur party. So we held a dino dig. We took a camping tarp and placed on the ground, spread two bags of sand on half of the tarp, bought a large wooden dinosaur puzzle (available at educational stores and some toy stores), spread the pieces over the sand area and covered with three bags of sand. We bought shovels from the Dollar store and the plastic paper plate holders to be used as sifters. A few notes. Preassemble the dinosaur and number all the junctions with permanent ink. This really helps when re-assembling it with a lot of kids wanting to know what type of dinosaur they dug up. The other thing is make sure that you only cover half of the tarp. The other half will be need to cover up the sand. We were originally planing on letting the kids paint the dino, but after it was all put together and they had some refreshments they wanted to do it all over again. My younger son, 2, want a dino party too, so we did something similar, but used plastic dinosaurs to dig up and used the sand box. Note: put the tarp under the sand box, we did not.