What I've been baking part 2

There is so much to do before moving, and so little time to do it. We leave in less than a month, and I just added ‘sell car’ to the to-do list. Yikes, that will certainly keep me busy. Today I plan on hitting the internet and figuring out how much to price my car at, but before I get going on that I thought I’d finish up the rest of my dino lesson!

My last post I talked about how the studnents went digging for dinosaur bones and then identified them. After they dug up the bones (that I made at home) they returned to their sand tubs and started digging for fossils (we learned about fossils the day before).



I think I see one! When the students began to see what looked like a fossil they switched over to their brush tool to uncover it the whole way, they didn’t want to accidentally break the fossil!



And there it is! When their fossil was completely uncovered they put it in their bucket with their bone and headed back to their seats. Once seated they drew a picture of their fossil in their dinosaur notebook, just like a real paleontologist would do. Then they had to make an educated quess as to what they had found a fossil of.



Want to know the best part of the whole fossil experience? They made the fossils themselves. They actually made them the day before after we finished talking about fossils.

I made the ‘dough’ the night before (recipie below) using coffee grounds that Starbucks kindly saved up for me. To save time I split the dough into pieces for each kid, made it into a round disk shape and then wrapped it in parchment paper and placed it in a ziplock baggie. Then I collected sticks, leaves, stones, shells, and made dinosaur foot print stamps out of potatoes. The next day the materials were all out on the table and the kids just had to pull out their parchment paper wrapped ‘dough’ open it up and start stamping/pressing. We found, due to the dark color of the fossil dough, that the bigger, thicker objects to make impressions with worked better, i.e. footprint stamps, sticks, rocks. The leaves and shells still made an impression, but they had to press really hard. When their fossil looked the way they wanted I wrote their name on the parchment paper their fossil was on so we knew who belonged to each one.

The only downside to this was that due to the coffee grounds and coffee in the fossil dough it smelled like coffee( bet you figured that out already). The kids didn’t love the smell, and one of the kids actually had to walk away and look at a dinosur book while we made his fossil for him. This would probably work better outside. If you think your students/kids might not like the coffee smell you could try using the dinosaur bone dough instead. I did like how dark these fossils came out though, and a little rough which made them seem more real. In fact, some of the kids thought they were!

Fossil Dough

1 cup of used coffee grounds
1/2 cup of cold coffee
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup of salt

Mix all the ingredients together and then form the dough into ½ inch thick circles. Stamp and decorate away. You can either let them sit out for 24 hours to dry, or pop them in the oven at 350* for 20 minutes.

Then you can share your fossil with everyone!