This is a super easy DIY dinosaur excavation that uses dried oobleck to encase the dinosaurs/fossils. For instructions on how to make the oobleck, check out my sensory play tar pit post. After you've made the oobleck, drop in some dinosaur toys, prehistoric creatures, bug toys, shells, rocks, and/or shark teeth. 

Let the mixture dry for a day or two - if you can put it out in the sun it will help it dry faster. Once it looks completely dry and starts cracking a bit, gently flip it out onto a tray. We got the tray in the above photo in the dollar spot at Target several years ago but you could always just use a large foil pan. Then arm your kids with a wooden hammer and chisel, a paintbrush, and a magnifying glass and let them excavate! (If you don't have a wooden hammer and chisel, random play dough tools can do the job as well. The materials cracks apart really easily so you don't really need anything specific.)

Uncovering treasures hidden inside!

Brushing off the fossil very carefully and showing Daddy what he uncovered!

I put the tent up over them to shade them from the sun and because it made it feel even more like a dig site!

After everything had been excavated, Lil C and Squidgy had a great time pulverizing the dried oobleck into dust and they played in it for hours! I had other activities ready to go but they spent the whole afternoon here, turning the oobleck powder into a small world for their creatures. And then Lil C had the idea to add water back to the powder, creating oobleck once more! Now the whole process has begun again!

 

Do you love dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures? Do you think it would be cool to discover the fossil of a never-before-seen creature? Or maybe solve the mystery of why the dinosaurs all died? Have you ever dreamt of being a paleontologist? Well, Addison Rue has. 

In "Addison Rue is a Paleontologist" by Samantha Cruz - the first book of the series, "Addison Rue and the Big Dreaming Book" - Addison Rue drifts off to sleep and finds herself right in the middle of a dig site! She realizes that she is a paleontologist and as so it is her job to learn about the past by studying fossils. As luck would have it, there are bones buried in her dig site! What does she uncover? You'll have to pick up this book to find out!

As homeschoolers, books like "Addison Rue is a Paleontologist" are fantastic for introducing unit study topics and building interest. After reading the story with my children (author Samantha Cruz kindly gifted us a digital copy for review), we were ready to become paleontologists. Or, almost ready...

Before we could excavate dinosaur fossils, we had to help them get trapped in tar pits where they could be preserved so as paleontologists we could uncover them millions of years later. To make our tar pits, we turned to our favorite non-Newtonian substance - oobleck.

- cornstarch

- used coffee grounds

- water

- (optional) coffee

1. Pour cornstarch into plastic bin. We used cold cuts containers and poured 2 cups of cornstarch into each one. (I HIGHLY recommend making a separate bin for each child, it makes things so much simpler.)

3. Add water (and coffee, if desired). I've often read a good ratio of cornstarch to water is 2:1 so we added 1 cup of liquid. However, our oobleck was too runny and we needed to add more cornstarch. Next time we do it I would start with a 1/2 cup of liquid and add a tablespoon at a time until we get the right consistency.

4. Stir it all together and start playing! We collected toy dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures as well as some bugs. As soon as you drop one onto the oobleck it slowly starts sinking in!

After we had previewed "Emma Ren: Robot Engineer" by Jenny Lu back in April, I knew I had to figure out a way to bring battle bots into our home, but without spending a fortune on actual robot parts. I was browsing various robot kits when I came across a tutorial on Instructables for turning remote control cars into battle bots. The idea was to build a simple cardboard cover for the car then add weapons which would be used to pop a balloon on the opponent's car. Cardboard armor?! Ingenious! Popping balloons? Fantastic! And we even had a couple cars we could use so I didn't have to buy a single thing for this project. It couldn't be more perfect! 

We've had our cars for a couple of years so I can't find the exact same cars for sale but these two are pretty close (and budget-friendly). 

This car is similar to ours with the large yellow wheels. It has a tri-channel transmitter so you could have up to 3 of these cars racing or battling at the same time.

These cars have the 5th wheel which is pretty fun for stunt driving. I'm pretty sure if we tried to pop a wheelie while battling the armor would all fall off though. You can only race/battle two of these cars at the same time though (pay attention to the details so you don't get two cars on the same frequency - it says blue and red are the same frequency and need to be paired with black. The other colors list specific MHz). 

Anyway, on to building the battle bots!

For the 5-wheeler, I marked about where the antenna and 5th wheel were then cut holes. There's no perfect method here, start small and keep cutting the hole bigger until everything fits through. I also cut where the back wheels are since they come up high.

For the rock crawler, I flipped the truck upside down and gently pressed it into the center of the armor box so I could see where the little pegs on top lined up. You can see below where the pegs pushed into the cardboard. Then I marked where the antenna was and made holes using a screwdriver.

Here's what the armor looked like once I folded the boxes and hot glued them. 

 

I wanted the armor to come down more in the front and back to make it easier to attach the balloon as well as defenses/weapons so I glued an extra flap on both sides.

Then I gave the cars to the kids and set them loose. I let them each have two wooden skewers plus toothpicks for weapons and then whatever else they wanted from our crafting/tinkering supplies.

Today we're jetting across the Atlantic Ocean to another landlocked country divided in two by a long river - Paraguay! Paraguay sits right in the middle of South America and is often referred to as the heart - or corazón - of South America. Because South America lies in the southern hemisphere, the seasons there are reversed from the northern hemisphere. That means it's winter in Paraguay now and Christmas is in the middle of summer! (Here's a good video explaining why we have seasons: Why Are There Seasons?)