Making a Clay T-Rex Dinosaur: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com. Today we are going to show you how to make some really cool dinosaurs with your young crafter. When you get ready to make your dinosaur, talk about the different kinds of dinosaurs, go to the library, gets books, if you already have books at home, that’s great, talk about the meat eaters and the plant eaters and what the earth looked like when the dinosaurs were on the earth. What would a meat eater look like as opposed to a plant eater and how can you tell the difference, looking at the teeth, looking at the claws, things like that. So today our first dinosaur we are going to make is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king in the dinosaurs, one of your kid’s favorite dinosaurs, I feel certain. When your child starts making a clay dinosaur, they are probably not going to know where to start, so what I do is I give them a model of each part of the body. So if you are going to start with the body, you can get that clay all pliable, and I usually start with an oval shape for the body, like so, then for Mr. T Rex we want to stretch up, bring their head over like this and talk to your child and let them do it with you, you have some clay in your hand, they have some clay in their hand let them do with you, but now we need to add some body parts. So talk to your child, what kind of feet and legs and arms did a T Rex have? Then we are going to make the feet and the front claws, so get two small pieces of clay, roll them out, shape them a little bit, make them pointy, because he has those big old sharp claws. Then when you are adding it to the body, show your child how to kind of press in the clay so that it looks like it’s actually part of the body. Now we need some big muscular back legs and of course we know T Rex was a pretty good runner because he had those big old strong legs. Now we are ready to start putting some details on it. We are going to use lighter color clay. This time we are going to form it into a ball and then just apply that little eyeball right there. Now we are going to start adding some details, so we are going to stretch that mouth out a little bit. We are going to open his mouth up with a little plastic knife. We know that the meat eaters needed very sharp teeth, so we are going to put a whole mouthful of teeth in here. Alright another thing you can use is the knife to give him some claws and those hindfeet in there and you have a Mr. T Rex. "