Ice Age Fossils and Sensory Activity

During our Ice Age unit, we made some fossils. We did it the same way we made our dinosaur fossils last year. I bought an Ice Age nature tube from Amazon and it came with several animals.

We used white Model Magic and flattened it into a circle. I bought the ones that came in small pouches and each child got one pouch. It was the perfect size. Then the kids picked one animal and squished it into the Model Magic, leaving an imprint behind.

I put them in the windowsill to dry up for a few days, then the kids used watercolors to paint them.

Once painted, the imprint shows up much better.

I also used those same plastic animals for a sensory activity. I froze them in a bread pan! I crumbled up pieces of tin foil so the animals could stand up at different levels. You could just freeze several layers and add animals with each layer, but I kind of forgot about it until a few hours before bed. So I did it this way instead.

Don't pay any attention to the saran wrap. It didn't do what I wanted it to do. I added a drop of blue food coloring to some water and poured it in the pan. It was only about an inch of water. Then I added the animals. I made sure all the animals had some body part in water so they would be frozen in place for the second step.

Before going to bed, I added the rest of the water so it covered the animals completely. And because they were already frozen in a little bit of water, they all stayed standing. The next day at school, the kids used wooden sticks to chip away at the ice. (They were from those scratch art kits.) We sprinkled a bunch of salt on top to make it melt faster.

You could hear the ice crack! The kids thought it was very cool. (No pun intended.) Later we poured warm water over it.

If it hadn't been pouring rain outside, we would have done this activity out in the sun! But eventually the kids were able to get all the animals out. It was an all-day-long activity, which ended with an ice cream party! (Another "ice" thing to go along with the Ice Age theme!)