How to Make Dinosaur Fossils

This is a great activity for preschoolers and kindergarteners. Most of them love dinosaurs, or salt dough, or both! 🙂

I saw this idea on Learning4Kids website and knew that my kids will enjoy making some dinosaur fossils. It doesn’t take too long, so I was able to squeeze it in our busy schedule. We have been going on trips and to different parks around the area, because it’s such a nice weather outside and it would be a pity not to take advantage of it.

All kids decided to participate and make dinosaur fossils, even the very young ones. And it was a blast!

What you’ll need:

• Salt dough (flour, water, salt);
• Dinosaur counters;
• brown paint (tempera or watercolors);
• parchment paper, oven, oven tray (these are optional).

You can go to Learning4Kids to read about how to make salt dough. You just need:

• 1 cup salt;
• 2 cups flour;
• 1 cup water;

If your mixture is too sticky, you can add more flour. If it’s too hard, add some water and knead well. What we didn’t do (but we should have done) was to add some brown food coloring (or watercolor) to the mixture, to make brown dough.

After kneading the dough, divide it into small balls and give one to each child. They can knead them and press them with their palms (they should be 1.5 cm thick or less and the diameter should be a bit larger than your dinosaurs). Then press the dinosaur figurine into the dough and take them out.

You can either leave the fossils to dry overnight or place them on parchment paper and in the oven for a couple of minutes. When they have dried, paint the imprints left by the dinosaur with the kids’ favorite colors (or just brown, for a more realistic look).