Dino Dig Day

It's Dino Dig Day! 

I got the idea on my first dollar store trip in 3 months! I had a double sided list and my cart was full but my one impulse buy (that wasn't chocolate) was a dinosaur bone sand toy set. On Fridays I like to do a theme of some sort to make things interesting and I was inspired by that dinosaur sand toy set. 

This was my set up for our Dino Dig: some plastic dinosaurs, plastic shovels and rakes and a big book of dinosaurs. Our theme day had two activities, a dino dig and making fossils. Later in the day we painted the fossils and had another dino dig outside.

Dino fossils

Salt dough:

2 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup water

Mix the flour and salt

Slowly add the water, 2 tbsp at a time

Kneed the dough, set aside until needed

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment as paper

Separate the dough equally amongst the kids.

Roll small portions of the dough into balls. Use the plastic dinosaurs figurines to make impressions of the dinosaur paws, tails etc.

Make fossils in the dough and set them on the baking sheet.

Dino Dig

What you need:

Container or cardboard box

Dinosaur 'bones' or small dinosaurs

Cover with rocks

Place the dinosaur bones, fossils or small dinosaurs in a cardboard box or container. Make sure it is not too big. I wanted to place the dinosaur bones in the right positions to make up a dinosaur but I didn't have enough rocks to cover it properly. The positioning doesn't matter anyways once the little hands get in there with the shovels everything gets pushed around and dug up. 

I used two containers of rocks that I had left over from previous crafts. I also added some big glow in the dark rocks from our fairy garden because I liked the contrast of colour and size. You can use anything you have on hand, sand, rice, dried beans or uncooked pasta would work as well.

Dino Dig Day Part 2: Afternoon Fun

Once the fossils are cooled it's time to paint them! We brought the fun outside for this part since it was such a nice day. Once they are out of the over they take about an hour to cool enough to paint. The whole process 

Just a funny picture, we call it self portrait of a T-Rex

Little Man wanted to make some into 'souvenirs' that you would find at a Dino Dig tourist shop. We painted the others with metallic bronze and copper acrylic paint. I added a top coat of clear paint to the 'souvenirs' to make them shinny but the metallic paints are shinny enough after two coats.

I buried the dinosaur fossils in the sandbox and we had another Dino Dig outside and then made out own dinosaurs in the sand.

Happy crafting!