Dinosaur Footprints

My youngest is way into Dinosaurs.  This is something I have encouraged right from the beginning since it is one of the first things that he showed an interest in on his own, without following his older brother's lead.  So needless to say we have lots of dinosaur books, puzzles (flat and 3-D), stickers, eggs, cookie cutters, etc...  This summer he even went to a half day dinosaur day camp at our local science center.  He had a bast!

So the other day as he was reading one of his books, he came across a project and asked if we could do it.  I thought it was an awesome idea.  Well, the first part of the project was "all Mom".  Unfortunately the potatoes were to hard to cut on their own (my older son definitely wanted in on this fun).  So, I cut the potatoes in half, drew the print on them and started carving.  I was actually amazed that I got through 4 prints and did not cut myself.

(Then my older son asked if I could carve out the letters of his name (which I thought was an awesome idea), so of course I did both the boys names & still managed not to cut myself.  If you knew me you would realize what an accomplishment this really is!)

At first I was just going to get out some of our large paper out of our art drawer, but remembered the roll of paper that I had in the basement.  So, I rolled the paper our onto the driveway & let the boys go at it.  WHAT FUN!

They printed one at a time, mismatched them up, printed two at a time & even though about attaching them to their feet and hands (but decided that they would probably break them & we were out of potatoes, so they couldn't make anymore (never mind the fact that Mom was not carving anything else, after carving 12 potatoes).

We even compared "our" footprints to Dinosaur footprints.  This was  a blast as my guys are always quick to paint themselves.  They had a great conversation between themselves about toes & shapes of feet & how Dinosaurs "real" feet would be lots bigger & what could we carve the footprints out of next time that would be bigger.  Every once in a while they would throw a question out to me.  Most of the time I didn't know the answer and let them know we would have to look it up in one of "A's" books or head to the internet.

What a great afternoon of fun!