Making salt dough dinosaur fossils for children

Recently I came up with some crafts and activities for Dinosaur Day, and one of those was salt dough dinosaur fossils. They were a a really successful craft with a lot of play value, and so in this post I'm going to expand on how we made them.

I have a standard recipe which I use for salt dough - 2 cups of plain flour, 1 cup of salt, 1 cup of water. Just mix it all together, adding the water gradually until you have a firm dough.

I rolled the dough out by hand into small flat shapes and then the children and I used a variety of things to make imprints into the dough. As well as small plastic dinosaurs we also used shells, small stones, leaves and twigs. We pressed the plastic dinosaurs in sideways and also used their feet to make little footprints.

I baked the salt dough fossils in the oven for about half an hour on a low temperature and then left them out for a few days to air dry. I've found that the best way to dry out salt dough is to leave it on a hot radiator for a few days to make sure that it's completely dry all the way through.

When they were dried through we used them for some dinosaur play. Harry's favourite activity was burying them in the sandpit and excavating them. We used spades to dig them up and a paintbrush to remove the sand. We also hid them through the house to find.