Fossil Activities

First we created a fossil sandwich.  We found the idea here.  You need some bread slices, jelly sweets and some water.  I think the more detailed jelly sweets you can find the better, we purchased ours with our online shop so I couldn’t really check the best ones to get.  You soak the sweets in the water for a couple of minutes then lay a few on a slice, add another slice, add some more sweets and so on.  Then put a few heavy books on top and leave for a few days.  We watched this YouTube video on how fossils are created and it all tied in rather nicely with our Mystery Science video for the week of ‘how do we know what dinosaurs looked like?’  Ours turned out like this – not quite the result we had hoped for, never mind, the imprints were fairly clear.

Next we decided to create salt dough fossils, we have done this several times before but they still enjoy it!  You need flour, salt, water and some bugs or other items you would like to fossilise.  We used one cup of flour, half cup of salt and half cup of water, mix well and knead to a dough – we added extra flour as it was rather sticky.  We then used a glass to cut out circles and pressed our bugs into the top.  Leave to dry out on a rack for several days – I think you can speed up the process in the oven if required.  We went on to paint ours and they turned out like this….Its hard to tell from the picture but we painted them grey!