Mom Camp Week 2: "Dino Days"🦖🦕 | Dinosaur Activities, Crafts & Snacks for Toddlers

Brianne Martin
Jun 22
6 min read

Welcome back to Mom Camp, where the themes are strong, the crafts are messy, and the creativity is prehistoric. This week’s theme? Dino Days — a fun, hands-on dinosaur-themed week filled with crafts, sensory activities, science experiments, and a real fossil dig field trip.

If you know Adeline, you know her love for dinosaurs is serious. So I wasn’t sure there was much new she'd discover, but it was the perfect chance to try some unique dinosaur activities for preschoolers that we hadn’t done before. This week involved more prep than usual, but the sheer joy on her face made every bit of effort worth it.

📚 Dinosaur Books for Preschoolers

We kicked off the week by visiting our local library and swapping out our bug books for a stack of dinosaur books for toddlers and preschoolers. The four we grabbed this week included:

Dinosaur Dream by Dennis Nolan
Barnum's Bones by Tracey Fern
Dinosaurs! by Gail Gibbons
Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers? by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld

I personally found Barnum's Bones super interesting, but I think Adeline's favorite was Dinosaur Dream. She liked to flip through the pages every night and imagine what it would be like if her own personal brontosaurus came to her in a dream! Overall, these books gave us a great foundation for dino facts and imagination to inspire the week’s activities.

🎨 Dinosaur Crafts for Preschoolers

🦖 Dino Footprint Art

We started with a simple craft: dipping plastic dinosaur feet in paint and stamping them on paper to make dino footprints. In reality? The footprints looked more like abstract blobs than fossils. If you want to try this craft for yourself, I highly recommend sticking to dinosaur figurines that have defined and flat feet!

🧴 Salt Dough Fossils

Since the dinosaur paint stomp ended up being a bust, I grabbed some flour, salt and water in an attempt to salvage our craft time! We mixed the ingredients together to make salt dough, then rolled it out and stamped dinosaur feet and bodies into it. You can either leave them to air dry or bake them. And once they're dried, it's like your own dino fossils!

🌈 DIY Pony Bead Dinosaur Sun Catchers

The crowd favorite craft for this week was our Dinosaur Sun Catchers! We filled dinosaur cookie cutters with transparent pony beads of different colors and then melted them outside on the grill. I set the grill to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit and checked on them every 5 minutes. It took about 10-15 minutes for ours to melt down. You can also use a toaster oven outside, but I highly recommend not doing this in your indoor oven! Not only will your house stink, but it will be filled with fumes that I'd imagine aren't what you want to be breathing in!

Once cooled down and dried, we popped them out of the cutters, drilled a small hold through the top, and threaded some clear fishing line through to hang on the windows with suction cup hooks. They came out so pretty and Adeline has loved hanging them in her room!

Tips for this craft:

(1) Put down some tin foil on top of a baking sheet and under the cookie cutters +

beads. If the cookie cutters are slightly misshapen and do not lay flatly on the baking

sheet, place something heavy and heatproof on top to help flatten them out.

(2) Only use enough beads to create one layer in the cookie cutter.

(3) If any of the beads leak through the bottom of the cookie cutter, use a hammer on a

safe surface to bang down on the cutter and cause the excess to break off before

removing the dinosaur from the cutter.

(4) Any small drill bit should work fine, but for ours we used a 3/32 inch

🧪 Dinosaur STEM Activities for Toddlers

We had a jam-packed week with tons of roaring activities! It required me to spend a little extra time in the evenings getting things ready, but seeing Adeline's joy and excitement made it all worth it!

🪜 Baking Soda Dinosaur Eggs

We started the week by dissolving some fizzy baking soda eggs. To create these, I used 1 box of baking soda, a little over a 1/4 cup of water, and various food colorings. Once mixed, just use your hands to pack the mixture down around a toy dinosaur, then pop them in the freezer to harden. I chose to freeze them overnight, but I've heard you can get away with only 30 minutes! The next day, we used white vinegar and watched the eggs dissolve in wonder. Adeline was absolutely mesmorized at her first experience "doing science" and especially excited that it came with a prize!

❄️ Frozen Dinosaur Egg Rescue

Since we had extra dino figurines, I created a second set of eggs for Adeline to crack! I placed the figurines in regular 12" balloons, filled with water, tied them off and then placed in the freezer overnight. The next morning, I cut the balloons away to reveal some frozen dino-trapped eggs. I handed Adeline some tools (ex. child-sized hammer, flathead screwdriver) and challenged her to use her problem-solving skills to crack the eggs open. Rather than waste her time with the tools, she thought outside the box and decided to throw them down on the cement until they cracked open. Then she melted the remaining ice away by placing them in her water table. Even though it wasn't how I expected it to go, you can't deny she definitely used some critical thinking and problem-solving!

🗺 Backyard Dinosaur Dig

Because two egg activities weren't enough, I also picked up two realistic eggs from the store. I buried them in our garden and then created a toddler-friendly treasure map to help Adeline find them. Again, I offered her tools to crack them open, but she instead chose to use the same method she'd used for the ice eggs.

In all honestly, I think the egg activities were a bit of an overkill - not that she minded them! But if I could go back and change something about this week, I think I'd have combined this activity with the next one. Perhaps a better set up would have been to leave mini "sand boxes" around the yard for her to hunt for and then use brushes to uncover toy fossils.

Sand Fossil Hunt

Adeline was so fascinated by the fossils we saw on our field trip (more on that further down) that I added an extra activity to this week's schedule. I purchased some plastic dinosaur fossils and placed them in a small plastic bin with play sand, then covered them slightly and let Adeline use paintbrushes to uncover the bones and act out her paleontology dreams!

🏫 Dinosaur-Themed Field Trip: Hands On Discovery Center

We wrapped up the week with a trip to the Hands On Discovery Center in Gray, TN, home to an actual fossil dig site! Keep in mind, they don't have dinosaur fossils but I thought she'd never notice...she did. Fortunately, she thought the Pliocene-era fossils were fascinating nonetheless! She ran around with glee admiring all the fossils and especially loved their hands-on exibits that allowed her to get in on the paleontology action!

If you've never been, I highly recommend checking this spot out! It's not only educational, but has lots of hands-on exhibits, as well as a indoor climbing tower to help get some energy out. Oh, and did I mention it's also surprisingly affordable?! Kids under 4 are free, so I only had to pay for my general admission ticket and the dig site tour - a whopping $13 in total! Can't beat that in this economy!

🍌 Dinosaur Snacks for Kids and Family Movie Night

To close out the week, we spent the day in the kitchen making a few dino-themed snacks:

Dinosaur fruit skewers - For these, we reused our dino cookie cutters to cut out some dino footprints from watermelon and then added some grapes and strawberries to the skewers as well!
Rice krispie treat dinosaurs (yep, we reused the cookie cutters again!)
Dino footprint sugar cookies - For these, we used this sugar cooke recipe and then attempted making dino footprints a second-time with Adeline's toys! This went a lot better than the footprint paint project and tasted much more delicious too!

We ended the week with our movie night. Options were limited since Adeline has already seen almost every dinosaur movie to ever exist! But we were able to find one that she hadn't seen yet: Walking with Dinosaurs (2013).

If your kiddo isn't as dino-obsessed as mine, some other great movie options include: