Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News Cheyanna Strong, 7, of Bowling Green wets a bucket of sand as she makes sculpture last year at Scotty’s Contracting and Stone’s Festival of Sand at the old Bowling Green mall. The event returns Friday to Russell Sims Aquatic Park.

advertisement

The sand returns to the water at this weekend’s seventh annual Scotty’s Contracting and Stone’s Festival of Sand at the Russell Sims Aquatic Center.

“We had been there years ago and wanted to go back,” South Central Kentucky Kids on the Block executive director Debbie Hays said of the move from the parking lot of the Western Kentucky University Central Region Innovation and Commercialization Center off Nashville Road. “I think it’s going to be a great weekend for families to come out.”

The two-day festival begins Friday with representatives from local schools, churches and businesses competing to build the best sand sculpture. Teams will build from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Awards will be given to first through third places in the corporate and school/church divisions. There will also be a Bowling Green Choice Award, for which the public can vote for $1 per vote, and a “Most Spirited” Award. Kids on the Block puppeteers will put on a show at 4:30 p.m. followed by an awards ceremony at 5 p.m.

Community Day is from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Saturday and will feature food vendors, free children’s activities, tattoos, face painting, duck pond and basketball. A cornhole tournament will be from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. with a cost of $20 per team. The winner of the Bowling Green Choice Award will be announced at 5 p.m.

All proceeds benefit Kids on the Block, a nonprofit, educational puppet troupe that offers programs on physical challenges, medical conditions and social and safety issues for children in grades kindergarten through age 6.

“This helps us fund the programs we send into our local schools because we don’t charge schools for the programs,” Hays said.

This year’s competition will feature 10 teams’ sand sculpting scenes using this year’s festival theme, which is to build something related to one of Kids on the Block programs.

“They have to expand on it to come up with their sculpture,” Hays said.

Long-time participants Briarwood Elementary School and St. Joseph Catholic School are basing their sand sculptures on Kids on the Block’s water safety program.

St. Joseph’s sculpture will feature a Kids on the Block puppet in a row boat pulling a child who has fallen into the water using a safety ring. The team has 14 students, five parents and several employees of sculpture sponsor J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, said Nick Noble, a liaison between the school and the bank as well as a volunteer coordinator of the team.

“It has been a great learning experience of teamwork,” he said.

Briarwood’s sculpture will feature the school’s mascot - a Siberian husky - Briarwood Elementary School guidance counselor and team captain Joanna Jones said.

“Huskies will be the lifeguards,” she said. “The Kids on the Block will be in the pool and on a slide.”

The team, which has about 20 fifth- and sixth-grade students and several parents and teachers, has been practicing since July, Jones said.

“Every year is more difficult in design,” she said. “There is so much teamwork involved in the process. Different children find their niche.”

— For more information about the Festival of Sand, call the Kids on the Block office at 842-2259 or visit the group’s Web site at www.kykob.org.