Making a Clay Dinosaur: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com and I am here today to show you how to make some clay dinosaurs, or clay anything with your young crafter. One of the great advantages of working with the clay and play dough with the young children is of course working on those fine motor skills and those hands which is why when they have get to kindergarten those handwriting skills, cutting skills, gluing skills, all of those things that use those little muscles in their hands, you prepare for that by using clay and things before they get to school. Today we are going to do dinosaurs and the reason why I prefer dinosaurs is little kids love them, number one, girls and boys, you can incorporate a lot of learning with dinosaurs. Number one, they are so enthused about it, number two you can build some wonderful science vocabulary with your young learner, and go to the library, get books on dinosaurs, books on how to draw dinosaurs, different periods of dinosaurs. You can bring so much learning into this and then as a culmination you can make a clay dinosaur. Things that you going to need, first of all, you need your working mats, so we don’t get clay or play dough all over the table, and there are a lot of different things on the market. Right now there is some new modeling clay that’s wonderful for little hands because it is not quite as thick and firm as some of the other clay; it’s much more pliable. This is the harder stuff, you know, it’s still good for little hands, to work those muscles and get that clay soft, they resist a little bit but this is probably better for younger kids. This is a white plaster type clay that air dries hard, and then the kids can paint it, which little kids love to paint, so this one is a good one too. It’s a little harder for the little hands to work. Another thing I like to do when we are doing our dinosaurs especially is put them on a hard paper plate, so when they want to carry it around, show to their friends and their family, they have some place to display it. You can do little paper plates, any kind of paper plate works. Another thing that I like to use is plastic utensils so that they can put texture onto their dinosaur and create some toes and claws and things like that."