Here’s a fun dinosaur activity for kids – dig for salt dough dinosaur bones!
Last year, I saw this fantastic idea on The Imagination Tree to make dinosaur bones out of salt dough. Salt dough is the perfect material for dino bones since it’s easy to make and very sturdy once you bake it.
To make our dinosaur bones, we used our standard salt dough recipe:
- 2 cups flour
- 1 cup salt
- 3/4 cup water
- 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
Mix all ingredients and knead until smooth.
The boys made dinosaur bones, fossil footprints (with toy dinosaurs), and dinosaur eggs.
I baked them for about 3 hours at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We let them dry for a few days and then set up a tub of dirt to play with!
I added some large paintbrushes so that the boys could pretend to clean off their fossils, just like real paleontologists.
If your dirt is moist, you’ll need to store the dinosaur bones somewhere else when they’re not being played with. If you leave them in the wet dirt overnight, they will turn soft like dough again (ask me how I know…)! Salt dough lasts a long time if you keep it dry. Another option would be to play with them in dry sand.
I love how Anna at The Imagination Tree made the dinosaur bones into a fun math activity. You’ll want to head over there and check it out!
4 Comments
Lisa @ This Pilgrim Life Mar 20, 2015
My boys are going to love this! They are huge dinosaur fans and we also just read about the Boxcar kids finding old Indian bones and archeologists excavating them, so it will be great to give them a hands-on connection. Another good idea would be to make them a journal and have them draw pictures of the bones and maybe even take measurements of each too.
Tera Mar 27, 2015
Perfect timing! Our oldest son turns 5 in a couple weeks and we're having a dinosaur theme party. The boys and I just made two cookie sheets full of bones, fossils and dino teeth and they're baking right now! We may get one of those plastic kiddie pools and fit it with dirt for our junior paleontologists! Thank you for the fun and easy idea!!
Jenifer Mar 27, 2015
I just surprised my four-year-old son with this today. I also opened up a pouch of dinosaur fruit snacks and hid those, too. He loved this so much! He asked me to re-hide everything several times and has hid them for me to find a few times as well. Thanks so much for this awesome post. We're looking forward to the ground thawing so we can bury them in a pot of dirt later.
Margurite Joseph Jan 28, 2019
We love your site, it has engaging information, Thanks!
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