Sensory Dinosaur Land Craft Project

Project Summary:

This sensory dinosaur land project takes a little time but it is so much fun to set up, it’s educational and it’s a great project to encourage teamwork between friends or siblings!

Project Details: Sensory Dinosaur Land Craft Project

You will need mini dinosaur toys. Amazon have an excellent selection of mini dinosaur figure sets which can be used in all kinds of craft projects, click on the links below to view details:

Latest Products: Mini Dinosaur Figures

Step 1: Make salt dough

You could choose to make salt dough instead of using playdough as you can make a large quantity of salt dough which works great to build big volcanoes.

The salt dough can be prepared with a simple recipe of 4 cups of plain flour, 2 cups of salt and approximately 1 cup of water. Mix the ingredients together and knead the mixture to form a soft dough.

Step 2: Build the base

A large plastic box is ideal for the base of the project as this means you can easily store the box in tidy location and the children could play with it throughout the week. If you have some green felt it can be used to line the bottom of the box to create a grassy landscape.

Step 3: Build the volcanoes

For this step, place a water bottle at each end of the plastic box and begin to build up around the plastic bottle with salt dough to build a volcano. Small rocks and stones can be used, along with salt dough to stabilize the base of the bottles within the box. Pushing pebbles into the salt dough also creates an authentic volcanic scene.

Step 4: Add toy dinosaurs

The next step is to gather dinosaurs and place them into their new home. We had fun using a dinosaur book to help us group the dinosaurs into families based on their classification (tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, diplodocus and so on).

Step 5: Add food dye

You could add water and red food dye to the plastic bottles to give the appearance of red lava. We also set up a foil container and used water mixed with blue food dye to create a blue lagoon for the dinosaurs to bathe in and drink from.

Step 6: Add classification sign posts

If you have lollipop sticks you can create sign posts with each dinosaur classification. This created a fun game for the children as they marched their dinosaur families through dinosaur land to reach the correct classification territory.

Step 7: Time to play

When dinosaur land has been completed children will have lots of fun playing with their dinosaur families.

When the children have finished playing with their dinosaur project you could consider turning the volcanoes into exploding volcanoes! You can find out how to create an exploding volcano by reading our Volcano Explosion Experiment tutorial!