We dove into our new Dinosaur study in September and will be learning everything we can about the Mesozoic Era through mid-January!  I will eventually be sharing our entire study on here [of course!], but first I need to finish sharing our botany study.  So I’ll just share this fun work the girls and I made together!

I found some awesome dinosaur skeleton figures online, and I knew I wanted to do something fossil-y with them.  After a brief plaster experiment [major fail, but I was able to repurpose it in a different work], we finally settled on making impressions in salt dough.  Nora was so excited to help make them!  We started with your typical salt dough recipe:

2C flour

1C salt

1C cold water

We mixed those until we had a nice dough, then rolled them out and cut circle shapes into them.  Nora pressed each dinosaur skeleton figure into the circles of salt dough, leaving an impression.  Then we baked them for a few hours at 250 degrees so they would harden.

Once the salt dough fossils were hard, I put the impressions in a basket alongside the dinosaur skeleton figures — now they’re a matching work!

Both girls enjoy this activity, but Nora is particularly drawn to it — especially since she remembers helping to put this work together!

This is just one of the fun ways we’re studying dinosaurs this fall.  I can’t wait to share the rest!

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