Do your children love dinosaurs? There are lots of fun dinosaur-themed activities on Activity Village, like the ones Shelly and her children try out in this guest blog post...
Dinosaur Art Activities
By Shelly
Dinosaurs are always popular in our house so as soon as I saw the new dinosaur tracing pages and learn to draw dinosaur pages I immediately printed a few pages for the kids.
The tracing pages are great for younger kids to use for pencil control but I also thought we could use them for a different type of tracing activity. First the kids need to turn the page over and then they have to draw over (shade over) the lines with their pencils. The kids are shading over the lines on the reverse side of the page – see below.
Scribbling over the back of the image
Making sure all the lines are covered
It is important that all the lines are covered, so with my son I did over a few sections for him.
Then they turn the page back over (so the picture is facing them) and place it on top of over a piece of paper (I suggest using a little bit of blu tack to stick the pages together so they don’t move) and the kids trace over the images.
Drawing over the allosaurus outline
Once the kids have drawn over the whole outline they can remove the top page and they will be left with the outline on the bottom page.
Stegosaurus image after tracing - the top image is our copy
I remember doing this a lot when I was younger and both my kids loved seeing the “tracing trick” in action.
Once you have your image you can get creative and use it in any number of ways. We decided to complete our pictures with oil pastels. I love using oil pastels with kids as they are soft and great for kids who struggle with pencil pressure. With oil pastels the kids can colour the picture in, blending different colours together (it works better if they do the blending with the lighter colour) or you can include a few tricks.
Our first trick is adding oil. Get the kids to colour in their image with the oil pastels and then pour a little oil (olive oil and baby oil both work well) in a small container and give them some earbuds.
They dip the earbuds in the oil and then use it to go over the oil pastels – it will blend the oil pastels together and give a lovely result.
Blending the oil pastels with extra oil using an ear bud
Our second oil pastel trick involves water colour paint. The different mediums work well together because the water colour paints do not mix with the oil pastels. So when you paint over oil pastels, the oil pastels remains and the water colour paints just go onto the sections of paper where it is empty. My kids tend to colour in details with the oil pastels
Stegosaurus with some oil pastel details
And then use their water colours to fill in the big areas and background areas.
Stegosaurus with water colours added for the background details
The kids love their new dinosaur pictures.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
