Before camp, I baked dinosaur figurines into “rocks” made from salt dough plus instant coffee for colour. I gave each of the kids a small screwdriver, mallet, and paintbrush for their excavations, and set them to work “rescuing” the dinosaurs from the rocks.

Once the dinos were all freed, we used them plus the larger dinosaur figurines to make some footprint art.

We made an imprint of dinosaurs and their footprints on modelling clay, and made a plaster cast of those fossils.

Next, we made some flying Pterodactyl puppets. I gave them a template to trace and it was very product-art-y, but it was a lot of fun and they enjoyed flying them around!

Our final planned activity of the day was this “build-a-dino” game. We each selected our playdough (just out of pre-existing resources, we didn’t make it this time), and then started choosing notecards that gave us extra resources to include.

We ended up having a fair bit of time remaining, so I moved up an activity that was meant for Tuesday. I gave them each a chosolate chip cookie, a toothpick, and a paint brush, and they got to work excavating the chocolate chip “fossils!” B7 really took to this activity, eventually getting nine chips out that were perfectly clean of any remaining crumbs.

It was pretty hot out yesterday, and unfortunately our chocolate chips were a little melty at first. I threw them in the freezer, and while we were waiting for them, pulled out my last backup activity for the day. My mom had found some of those little grow capsules when she was cleaning out her stash of old art supplies and kids activities, and sent them to me in case I could use them. They were dinosaurs, so it fit perfectly this week! The kids enjoyed watching them slowly unravel until the cookies were ready for attempt #2.