Making a Clay Stegosaurus Dinosaur: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert village.com. We are going to make a stegosaurus. To make your stegosaurus you need a body, so talk about it with your child on how to shape; most bodies are kind of oval-shaped to them started and then we are going to pull out a tail. Now Mr. Stegosaurus, he had some good defense because his tail had some spikes on it; talk to your child about blending it in with the rest of your body. Now Mr. Stegosaurus has bony plates on his back, so we are going to use those fine motor muscles in your hands and we are going to pinch up some bony plates on back of Mr. Stegosaurus. Now we are going to get his head come out here a little bit. We have his bony plates, we have his spiky tail, which we know is one of his defense mechanisms whenever somebody came up to him, he would whack him with his tail and then a small head. Now we are missing some body parts right here, which would be legs. Take some more clay, talk your child how many legs would a stegosaurus have, make four balls and then start shaping those balls, kind of basically like a box, rectangular shaped, pickup your dinosaur and talk about blending it in. Now I want to just kind of curve down a little bit, looks like a little foot, do that four times, blend it in with his body and bring that little baby out so he will stand up and your bony plates might have got messed up, you can always fix them, that’s the beauty of clay, you can fix it. Okay, so we have his basic body; now we need some details. Now Mr. Stegosaurus didn’t eat meat; he ate plants, so his teeth are going to look a little different, they are more flat. Again you are just going to make some teeny little teeth, open his mouth up big, put those teeth in, may even give him a little tongue if you want to and now we need some eyes. Now with your plastic utensils you can give him some nostrils, you can give him some texture on his body with a fork, just little markings. He may have a few scars from T Rex biting him, give some claws and toes and just basically from these shapes that we have started with the oval body, rectangular legs, you can make almost any dinosaur and there is Mr. Stegosaurus. Now we are going to put Mr. Stegosaurus in his habitat and again we are talking about swampy; we have water, we have lots of green plants and since he likes to eat plants, we are going to give him some plants to eat and there we are Mr. Stegosaurus but he better be watching out for T Rex. "