Half Term Adventures: Thursday

Sorry, time ran away with me toward the end of half term there and I didn’t find the time to blog. So where was I? Thursday? Oh yes, Thursday! We made fossils!

In light of Callum’s homework…sorry home learning we are supposed to call it aren’t we?…anyway, in light of what he had been asked to do by the school over half term, create something on the theme of dinosaurs, and with minds full of the exciting things seen at the museum the day before, I we decided to make fossils! Actually, the fantastic idea came from a Twitter friend @Kellit1085. She suggested we make some salt dough and use Callum’s toy dinosaurs pushed into the dough to make the fossils.

I’d forgotten about Callum’s dinosaurs and, what was better, part of his collection included a skeleton dinosaur as his set was part of a archaeology themed set. Perfect! With that, we also visited our shell collections (Callum has his chosen shells and stones and then I have my own special collection haha) to look for ones that would make good fossil like impressions.

Check me out! Twice in one week I’m crafting with my child in a stress free manner – not to mention the baking also achieved! I’m going to need a holiday after this half term!

Of course the fun starts at the dough making stage, getting fingers all sticky and then beating up needing the dough. Following a tip from this site I’d found on the internet, we also added food colouring to make the dough a browny colour.

Once smooth, I broke off a piece and shaped it and Callum (with maybe a little guidance from me) pushed one of his smaller dinosaurs and the skeleton dinosaur into the dough. Then we tested out all the shells too. I classed this first one as our Callum’s practice fossil. The remaining dough I split in 2 and tried very hard to let Callum do what he liked with one of the pieces while I possessively made my own fossil impressions in the other piece.

When we were happy with our creations, I baked them in the oven for about 1.5 hours at 200 degrees (hotter than I’d usually bake salt dough for but the advice in the above site was a higher temp and I figured it might add to the authentic brown look) then I left them in the oven for another hour while the oven cooled.

Here are our finished fossil creations:

Callum has taken them into school today. I’m so excited about them, I wish I was there to see how they are received.