One day when we run out of shelves, we're going to put some more on.
This is my fossil shelf. It's in my bedroom, by my reading corner. Daddy made it all. We had a shelf, but we needed more shelves. So Mummy and I went to the studio, and we made some shelves. Mummy sawed them and I painted them, and Daddy screwed them in-between the shelves that were there. The top shelf is the present shelf, the middle shelf is the ones that we bought, the next shelf is the fossil-found-shelf, and then there's my grading ammonites (every time I grade in Taekwondo, I get an ammonite. I've done three gradings, so next grading is my all-green belt, and I'll get another ammonite).
One day when we run out of shelves, we're going to put some more on.
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This is me, Toby, in my school t-shirt, making dinosaur cookies. First, we put flour, dark sugar and butter (edit from Mummy: and bicarb of soda) in a bowl, and I had to break it all up into tiny pieces. Then, we added an egg and three spoons of golden syrup, and I had to make a ball. Mummy helped a little (just at the end). We made the dinosaur cookie pieces. Each dinosaur needed a front, a back, and two leg pieces. These are dinosaur pieces, we were about to put them in the oven. When they came out, they were nearly all dry. We had to leave them to cool down. This is the dinosaur cookie when it's built. Thank you, Auntie Katrin, for the dinosaur cookie cutters, we are going to make more of them! Today, the fur arrived, and we finished the mammoth. First, we did the legs with fur - we cut the fur and we sticked it on with glue. Then we did the head. We did it in two halves. We did the belly, and then we did the trunk. The body is the last thing - but we nearly ran out of glue! Here are a couple of pictures of the mammoth finished. Would you like to make a mammoth? We are still working on our mammoth. First we changed the head a bit, so it looks more like a mammoth. Yesterday, we made the tusks out of clay. I made one and Mummy made one. We curved them round with a toilet roll. This morning, they were dry, and we stuck them to the mammoth. Now we're waiting for the fur to finish it - maybe it'll come today! It was my birthday, and I got lots of lovely fossil presents, but I'll tell you about them another time. Today, I want to tell you about my mammoth what I'm making. It is a model, because we want to make a bigger one, and this is a test to see if it'll work. We first made the body - we crunched some newspaper into a ball, and then we wrapped it in wire mesh, then we did papier mache all around it and left it to dry. Today, we made the head and the legs. The legs are made of toilet rolls, and the head it more scrunched up paper. First we used sellotape to fix it, and then we covered everything in more papier mache. And now it is drying. Next, we're going to do the ears and the trunk, and we'll show you when it's finished. And if it works, we'll make a big, big, big one. We went to a dinosaur park in Germany. Auntie Katrin found it for us. There was lots to do, and lots to see. We saw lots and lots of dinosaurs, and real dinosaur tracks, because the park is where they found real dinosaur tracks. This is a track of footprints. This is exactly where it was found, and real experts are still looking all the time to find new things. They are working in the park. I've got my foot on a dinosaur footprint in the picture below - can you see? These are giant squids, but they walk on land, they are a bit like an elephant. But they're not real. In the park, there is a hall where they show creatures what they might look like in millions of years, like in five million years. This is me excavating a dinosaur head. It's a copy of a real head. The dinosaur was an eoraptor. It grew about as tall as Mummy's knee, so it was a small kind. It was in a block of plaster, and I had to be super careful so it doesn't break. There wasn't an eoraptor in the park, but we found a picture of one (taken from http://www.dinosauriens.info/dinosaures/dinosaure_eoraptor.php) I found a fish head in this rock. They were real fossils, but it was like a surprise, like our surprise fossils. You had to split and split the stone to see what you could find - and we all found something. Auntie Katrin found a fish scale, and Mummy found coprolite, and I found a fish head. We'll take some pictures and show you. This is me painting a dinosaur skull. It was like a 3d picture, and it was made of plaster. I had a really, really good time, and I want to go again! Today, we made fossil chocolates. We made a mould out of putty. It was in two parts, and we had to roll it to mix it together. (Edit from Mummy: food-grade silicon) Then we pushed fossils in the mould - we cleaned them first. When the moulds got hard, we pulled the fossils out. We made a few moulds from each fossil. We left the moulds over night, and then we washed them to get them nice and clean. Then we needed to get the chocolate into the moulds - but they didn't fit like this! So, we had to melt it. We had a pot of boiling water, with a pan in it. And that pan - can you see in this picture? - had the chocolate in. The chocolate started to melt. We put the chocolate into the moulds, then we put the moulds in the fridge. And this is what they looked like! ...and that's our whole story. Why don't you make some chocolate fossils? Today we built a stone age hut. Yesterday before yesterday we made lots of bones and tusks and vertebraes out of white clay, and they had to dry. And this morning before school, we looked for sticks. When we came home, we made it. We made some paint for the protection and sprayed it with a toothbrush. Then we used clay to spread it for the ground. We put the sticks in. We made the guard bit from the stones so nothing gets in. The stones are from Creswell Crags where we we went to look at the caves. Then we put the cover on. In the stone age, it was maybe grass. And then, we glued the bones on. We got the idea to make the hut from a book. I am going to get a stone age man, and he can live in the hut. |
AuthorHello, my name is Toby. I am five years old, and I want to be a palaeontologist. I really like fossils, so I'm writing down everything I do with fossils! My Mummy is doing the typing until I'm a bit older, but she writes everything I say. Archives
September 2014
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