Dino Eggs (AKA baked cotton balls)

My little ones absolutely LOVE dinosaurs. Last week we made dinosaur eggs using baking soda and it was a huge hit. This time we are using a recipe we found at Play Create Explore. They don't actually hatch dinosaur babies, but they do hatch white fluff, and that was good enough. 

The recipe is super simple:

1 cup flour

1 cup water

food colouring (optional, but colour makes it more interesting, especially if you are teaching colours and it's exciting to crack it open and see that the colour is only on the outside and it's still white inside)

a bowl and spoon to mix the flour and water together and bowls to separate the colours

Divide the flour mixture. We chose to do blue, green, red (turned out pink) and yellow.

I showed them how to dunk the cotton balls in and cover them, after that they had no problem (although I had to wash their hands several times because they don't like getting their hands dirty).

We placed a sheet of parchment on our cookie sheet just in case they decided to stick, and they came right off after they cooled down.

They made quite a few! The last few got dunked in the different colours, so we had a few rainbowy dino eggs. 

Bake at 300 degrees for 45 minutes. And... ta-da! 

They took a few minutes to cool down and then I put them in a bin and handed them hammers. 

They explored the dino eggs with their hands first. Bean discovered that she could squish them and a little bit of air would escape. She thought it was so funny and would squish them next to her ear and giggle. Munchkin immediately tried to tear them open and it wasn't as easy as he thought it would be. It was a good challenge for him, since he sometimes gets frustrated when he can't get something the first time. But Bean and I gave him some encouragement. Bean would remind him, "try, try, try again." 

Then they picked up the hammers and started smooshing them!

But it turned out that it was more fun to crack them open with their hands.

Luckily these weren't real dinosaur eggs, because they had so much fun breaking them. 

A few of them came right out of their shells!

There were a few left over, so we will be able to use them again tomorrow. So fun! I think the next time we make these we will add glitter :)

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