More Dinosaur Stuff

We made some "dinosaur fossils" inspired by a pin from Love, Play, Learn.  It was a great bribery tool for me when trying to get the girls to pick up the living room.  On Saturday mornings we create what I call "Saturday Morning Disaster".  We ignored it until after nap when I gave them snack then said we would do a project as soon as the living room was tidy.  That got them working!!

We made a simple salt dough and grabbed the tray of dino toys to press into the dough.  This was the PERFECT activity.  Not very messy but very tactile.  Everyone had fun- the 4 year old, the 2 year old, and the 34 year old.

Measuring and mixing...

They took turns mixing until it got too tough...

Kneading the dough...

Then I baked them in a 200 degree oven for about 2 hours.  Then turned off the oven and left them there/ forgot about them.  The next morning the thick ones were still a little moist on the bottom so I flipped them and put them back in for about an hour then put them on top of the oven to cool.

While the girls ate morning snack I prepped the dig.  We watched a few videos of paleontologists working in the field and while Ada and I thought it was super cool when they found big bones it wasn't exactly relatable since they were mostly using jackhammers and drills and dynamite to expose the fossils.  We used sand toys and paint brushes.  Oh well.  The girls LOVED this activity.

Again this idea came from a pin from Love, Play, Learn on dinosaur fossil excavation.  She uses edible ingredients in the bin and I used similar things.  What I did differently was to make layers instead of stripes in the bin so we could talk about the layes of the Earth a little.  Ada faned interest in this aspect I think mostly she was just humoring me so I would stop and she could get to work digging.  I made 2 bins to avoid conflict...

In the bottom I put most of the fossils they made then some oats (these have been used and reused many times in sensory bins for Emma) and a bag of semolina flour I found in my cupbord that was woefully out of date, then some crushed chocolate cookies that were also past due.  This would be a fun thing to do to clear out old stuff in your baking cupboard.  You could really throw about anything dry in there and it would be fun- ours smelled like chocolate but I was thinking it would be neat to do a bin sometime with flour and spices (for another sensory experience) and do and archeology dig with pyramids, etc. from one of those Safari tubes...

Then some chocolate cake mix (this was a great addition because we pretended the clumps were rocks and when we found one as we were digging/ playing we would crush it between our fingers and it was awesome).  On top of the mix went more fossils.

Next comes flour (she used whole wheat, I used white because it's cheaper and I don't think the girls will hold it against me although the whole wheat would certainly be more Earthen looking).  Then a little more cake mix and crushed Oreos.  **A quick side note of disclosure: I love Oreos.  Love them.  They are my junkiest food love and while they were nice to have in this project, also completely unnecessary.  I didn't need to get them and this would have been a fine and fun project- the girls wouldn't have missed them.  But I love them and this was all the justification I needed to buy them and proceed in eating massive amounts of Oreos later in the day.

The layers from the side of the bin looked like this.

Next came the fun.  I don't have tons of pictures of the whole thing because I was playing with them and very messy, but you can see by the last pics how fun it was.  Also, they were actively playing with this for 45 minutes.  We ended up adding our dinosaur figures into the mix and burying them and finding them.  Then we spent some time burying our hands and digging them out.  It felt really cool.  And they both asked to play with it later in the day- I did save the bins and we will likely do it again tomorrow.  Glad I made them in bins with covers:)

As expected, Ada took it very seriously and worked diligently on each piece.

This one is fuzzy, but I love it anyway :)