Dinosaur Playdough Play

As we were getting ready for Little Brother's Dinosaur birthday party this month we were excited to set up a new playdough play invitation. This invitation uses one of our all time favorite playdough recipes - we call it "Chocolate Cake Playdough" because it has the amazing scent of real chocolate.

For this playdough play invitation we added in a few key pieces: miniature dinosaurs, floral rocks, and fake plants so that the boys could create a dinosaur world.

Dinosaur Birthday Party

This month Little Brother turned 4, and if you've been reading with us for a while now you know that we love fun birthday themes over here at Kitchen Floor Crafts! For this birthday we decided to go with a "Dinosaur Birthday Party" theme!

For this post we were excited to team up with Oriental Trading Company to come up with some great favors, paper goods, and more! We also created some favorite old activities that fit perfectly this birthday party theme.

Dinosaur Egg Sensory Play

Some of our activities I plan out and some of our activities just happen. On the days they turn into something that's tons of fun, and I know we might want to do again, I try to grab the camera. That's exactly how this Dinosaur Egg Sensory Play evolved.

Recently we were given a tub of "Delta" sand by my Dad. As far as I can tell, it's pretty similar to Kinetic Sand (although maybe not quite as fluid.) Online I had seen a cool video posted by Hallecake to use kinetic sand with plastic eggs. 

Create a Dinosaur Pop-Up Card

This is a fun design for a pop-up card that we've used a few times now for friends' birthdays. We like to call it a "dinosaur" but with a few changes in color it could also be a monster!

We had the chance to make one this past weekend for a friend of Big Brother's sixth birthday. It's also a great project now that the new movie The Good Dinosaur is almost out in theaters!

Quick Pick & Project of the Week: Dinosaur Stomp Painting

We're still putting together posts on the fun we had recently with our dinosaur week. We absolutely love the book Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp and it leant itself perfectly to our Quick Pick and Projects of the Week series.

What we love about this book is the rhymes, the use of the actual dinosaur names, and the idea that they are all celebrating somewhere together. It's really upbeat and fun to read aloud. We've gotten it out of our library several times. 

To create our dinosaur stomp paintings we used our collection of toy dinosaurs. Most of our dinosaurs come from an awesome Learning Resources play set we purchased a few years ago. They have different shaped feet, so it made the painting fun because there were different prints. 

Shortbread Fossil Cookies

We love tying snacks into our new weekly themes, which led us to create these yummy shortbread fossil cookies. Not only did they fit in with the dinosaur fun we've been having, but they are perfectly delicious too!

I've seen a couple of recipes like this before, but we based ours on a buttery shortbread. For this recipe I did most of the prep work and cooking while Big Brother helped with pressing in the images. This is a very soft dough, and as it was a very warm day that made the rolling and cutting of the dough a little trickier. 

Ingredients:

2 sticks of unsalted butter (softened to room temperature) 

1/2 cup white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Cereal Box T-Rex Statue

When little kids think dinosaurs they of course think of T-Rex first. So for dinosaur week we had to do something where we made our own T-Rex!

Before crafting we learned a few things about the tyrannosaurus rex (some of them are well known facts, but to 4 year old Big Brother it was great information and mostly new.) 

A Few T-Rex Facts (from the Usborne Book of Dinosaurs)

• T-Rex dinosaurs are meat eaters, or carnivores. They ate other dinosaurs and sometimes scavenged. 

• They were so heavy they could probably only run for short distances at a time. 

• Its hands only had two little claws. 

• Its teeth had edges like saws. 

Homemade Dinosaur Bones

We've definitely been feeling a little frazzled here between the hot and humid weather, a sick toddler, and several days cooped up in the house. Luckily, kicking off our dinosaur week is proving to be a great distraction.

Dinosaur books are something I've been collecting for a while now, so we officially kicked off the week by reading several different dinosaur books. Later this week we'll be creating a dinosaur bone excavation, and while I had planned on creating the bones, I realized it would be much more fun to get Big Brother involved.

Homemade Dinosaur Bones

These homemade dinosaur bones were easy to make and are proving to have more than one way to use them.