Brownie Girl Scout Dinosaur Badge Craft: DIY Dino Fossils

We recently had a Brownie Girl Scout Stone Age & Space Age Summer Camp here in Northern Virginia!

The girls traveled back in the time of Dinosaurs then into the space age by playing games, making crafts and earning badges Dinosaur and Cosmic Adventures.

The Dinosaur badge is super fun and is still being offered as a ‘council own badge’ from Greater Chicago & Northwest Indiana council. You can purchase them here. From there you can also view the badge requirements.

We have conducted this badge several times in our past workshops but we are always on the lookout for new craft activities to do with this badge. When surfing Pinterest for Dino crafts we came upon this Dino Hatching Egg activity from Growing A Jeweled Rose Blog! (Thanks for sharing!) We got inspired and decided to put our own twist on it for the Dino badge. The girls LOVED being little Paleontologists! See below!

What you will need:

Surface that can get messy! We did this outside. Lay a tarp out or just do this on the grass.
Baking soda
water
bowls
baking sheets
mini dinosaur figurines (found at Dollar Tree or Party City or online)
Squirt bottles filled with water (you can purchase these at Dollar Tree or just re-use an old squirt bottle)
plastic or metal spoons or Popsicle sticks for “digging” up the fossils

How to make it:

Start by putting a few cups of baking soda in a large bowl.
VERY slowly pour a cup of water into the baking soda. Use a spoon to mix it slowly together. You may need to add more water again slowly….until it forms a very slightly crumbly dough/paste. The trick is to get it wet enough to forms the fossils but not to wet that it turns to water all the way.
Start forming little round egg shaped balls of the mixture. Stick a dino in the middle then cover it up so it is no longer visible.
We layed them out on baking sheets and stuck them in the freezer overnight. They do need to be chilled for a while to form the hard fossil shape.
When they were hard we took them out and set up our excavation site! We had pretend T-Rex footprints (made from poster board-and that is actually one of the badge requirements for the Dino badge) to set the scene. We then gave the girls metal spoons, popsicle sticks and squirt bottles of water. They loved spraying and dissecting the fossils with all of their “tools”!
This is a great activity to use towards earning this badge. Be sure to share your comments with us if you end up doing this with your troop.