Dinosaur Archaeological Play Dig: Create some simple clay dinosaur bones for use in sensory play activities to learn about shapes and letters at the same time! This is a great activity that is simple to do, amazing for some hands on exploration, and easy to take with you on the go!

As we have been exploring our Dinosaur theme Meatball has been adding in some of his own elements. The other night after playing with our Dinosaur Dirt (or more like while mommy cleaned it up), Meatball dragged out some play dough, clay, and stamps to distract himself with.

With the dinosaurs still sitting at the table, he went to town making impressions and playdough fossils. I love getting those little sneaks into the way that his mind works since he still is not yet quite talking.

Following his lead I pulled out our vowel stamps and grabbed some of our homemade air dry clay to make some fossils that we could use for an archaeological dig at the park!

Items Needed for a Dino Dig:

ABC Stamps (ours are the lower case version of these –sorry could not find them online anywhere)
DIY Air Dry Modeling Clay
Small Dinosaurs
Various Dig Tools – Magnifying Glass, Paint Brushes, Shovels, etc.

How to Make Pretend Dino Fossils:

This was super simple and took me less than 20 minutes to put everything together. It did need to dry over night.

I simply made small balls of clay in which we pressed the stamps into (we only had enough for our vowels). We also did a couple that were dinosaur imprints and made some “snake” shapes of various lengths to act as bones (we tried to make them bone shaped but they ended up looking more like the letter I — just rolling was much easier).

In the morning once everything was dried we threw our kits into a small Rubbermaid and headed out the door to the park!

{if the weather isn’t quite warm enough to get outdoors with yet add these fossils to Dino Dirt for some indoor fun}!

One thing I absolutely adored about using these particular stamps for creating our fossils was that the impressions that they left in the clay were the PERFECT size for little fingers to trace!

This activity was definitely a major hit with ALL the kiddos at the park. Next time we bring this out we will definitely need to bring some more tools!

These fossils can be used for everything from discussion on what fossils are, size sorting, letter exploration and identification, and whatever else your child can dream up!

[Tweet “Because Dinosaurs are absolutely fascinating and always worth stopping to inspect! #ece”]

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