The laughs and shrieks of 2,500 children crowding dozens of exhibits gave the Nixon Library a kind of carnival atmosphere Wednesday, the kickoff of a two-day festival meant to saturate youngsters with knowledge about water, wildlife and the environment.

Some 5,300 children from more than 70 schools are expected to move through the displays and presentations by the end of the Children’s Water Education Festival Thursday. The booths, even those with titles like “Water Treatment Plant” and “Watershed Model,” seemed to energize the fourth, fifth and sixth graders, who immersed themselves in the hands-on exhibits.

“Did you know seaweed is actually present in ice cream, toothpaste and chocolate milk?” Jennifer “Jelly” Mitchell of the Wyland Foundation asked one group.

After her short talk, the kids got down to business: putting on smocks and painting a mural of ocean life.

The reason? So “people could learn about animals in the sea and ones that aren’t in the sea,” explained Eduardo Morales, 10, from Danbrook Elementary School in Anaheim.

Not far away, staff members from the Disneyland Resort — a major sponsor of the event, along with the Orange County Water District — managed to get a crowd of perhaps 100 children cheering for things like dual-flush toilets and low-flow faucets in a game-show type presentation.

At other outdoor exhibits, children had a chance to conduct their own taste tests of tap vs. bottled water, see a “Green Earth Magic Show,” test the acidity of soft drinks, learn how rain drives pollution down creeks and storm drains into the ocean, and see how groundwater sinks into the county’s deep underground aquifer.

Inside the library, they could clamber into a giant, inflatable planet earth, where the view was a bit disorienting: the continents are reversed, and the place has a bluish cast from the light shining through expanses of ocean.

“I’m drowning…glug glug,” one boy joked as he stepped inside.

“Welcome, you guys, to the inside of the earth,” said David Knutson, whose non-profit company, Earth Adventure, provides environmental science education to school children around the country.

The balloon, he said, is based on some 2,000 photographs, portraying a cloudless earth with summer in both hemispheres.

“It’s earth at its greenest,” he said.

At another exhibit, the children had a chance to put on suits made of trash — plastic bottles and the like — after watching a clip from the film “Tapped,” by Charles Moore, an activist famed for raising alarm about the “garbage patch” in the Pacific. It’s an area of concentrated plastic pollution that is a hazard to a variety of animals.

The exhibit, put on by Vapur, a California company that makes collapsible, reusable bottles, includes a question and answer session — “How many bottled-water bottles are consumed annually in the U.S.?” — then a chance for a couple of the youngsters to put on the trash suits.

“Does it feel gross?” Liz Reinke of Vapur asked Katie Dvorak, 10, of the Integrity Christian School in Anaheim.

“Yeah, kind of,” she said.

When asked what she learned from the experience, her answer was simple.

“That trash isn’t pretty,” she said.

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