Dinosaur Week Round 1: Messy Projects

We kicked off Dinosaur Week with a surprise!

We had not had sand in our sandbox for about a year (where does all the sand go?), so the kids thought the surprise was the sudden reappearance of sand.

But they hadn't dug long when they started uncovering bones, and eventually they reconstructed this fine dinosaur skeleton!

While they were doing that, I was inside resorting my posters and pulling out the dinosaur ones.  I had been stockpiling dinosaur themed stuff for quite a while, and then I discovered Pinterest, so I ended up with way more than a week's worth of activities.

Leena's

I had found some foam dinosaur stickers, and the Zoomlians kind of went wild with them, so then we had even more dino things to put on the wall!

Klenda did a sketch augmented with stickers.

 My all time favorite dinosaur activity is to put (dry) bones into plaster of paris, and then have the kids chip them out.  This time I had an enormous pile of bones which I had been saving since last Thanksgiving (turkey bones!) and 5 pounds of plaster of paris left in my 25 pound sack (under $10 at a hardware store).

 We made over a dozen bone embeddings, and we took to making "fossil" impressions  on the outside with shells.

We uncovered some of the bones the next day, while the plaster was not fully cured, and some the day after when it was.

 We actually gave away some of them to kids who visited us!

Choclo and Oob merrily whacked away at theirs with hammers, and speedily uncovered their bones.

Klenda and Leena went in the paleontologist's direction, uncovering the bones with chisels and paintbrushes.

Everyone had fun!

 Lastly, we made dinosaur "eggs" by making a kind of clay from old baking powder and shampoo, then forming into "eggs" around little plastic dinosaurs.

After they dried (overnight) we "hatched" the eggs by putting them in water.  This was really neat because the eggs foam up with a consistency that's hard to describe: like marshmallow fluff, but not sticky.

If you don't have old baking powder, you can use baking soda, just dissolve them in vinegar water.