How to Make Your Own Sedimentary rock -

We learnt about sedimentary rock as preparation for the dinosaur dig we would be doing. We used the pack from TPT entitled Understanding Paleontology:

I had A7 read out the reader on Paleontologists included in the pack, which the girls then coloured in:

We learnt about sedimentary rock:

and filled in a lovely sheet about how dinosaurs are buried beneath sedimentary rock.

Making a Sedimentary Rock Dessert

We created a sedimentary rock dessert from crushed Oreos, crushed digestive biscuits, some chocolate mouse and some toffee angel delight:

The children (and Gary) layered them in a container to create the layering effect of sedimentary rock:

And the results:

Make your own Sedimentary rock to Bury Dinosaur Bones

Although we would be doing a standard dinosaur dig using a kit I had bought, I also wanted to emulate what real paleontologists would do by following the scenario found in the following book:

But first I needed to make up some sedimentary rock and bury some dinosaur bones in it. This rock would then be dug into and buried for the little paleontologists to discover at a later date 🙂

You’ll need to gather together the following:

Large plastic container
Cling Film
Earth from the garden
Sand
Plaster
Water
large and small bones (for small bones I used one of the skeleton dinosaur models the girls had already dug out, and for the large bones I bought a few hide dog bones. These were inexpensive and seemed to work well).

First I lined a large plastic container with cling film (this was just to make it easy to remove the contents once they had set). I added the earth and sand:

then some plaster dust:

I added some water:

Placed in the bones at various angles, spreading out the small ones, and allowed to set:

Once set, we dug a hole in the garden and placed the whole ‘sedimentary rock’ into the hole (removing the container and cling film). We then covered it over with earth in readiness for our dinosaur dig the next day: