Make your own treasure rocks or fossils (great party favors)

[shortstack]

My daughter had to do a "rock project" for her science class and of course waited until the last minute to tell me so that meant we couldn't do a kick butt volcano. Instead we made treasure rocks with a bouncy ball hidden inside for each of her classmates to break open
This recipe costs a little bit of nothing to make......

Materials:

1 ½ cups flour

1 cup used coffee grounds (got these from the compost pile)

½ cup salt

¼ cup sand (we didn't have any sand so we used dry light colored dirt from our yard lol)

1 cup water

Treasure Rocks: Mix the ingredients together with a spoon in a large bowl until a soft dough forms. You may need to use more flour to get the consistency just right. Pinch off marshmallow-sized balls and lay them on a wax paper-lined cookie sheet. Carefully use your fingers to make a hole in each ball and then hide a small treasure inside. (See a list of ideas below.) If your trinkets are larger than will fit in the ball, you can use more dough but must allow for a longer drying time. Cover the hole and make sure the treasure is sealed in there really well. The rocks will shrink a bit as they dry so allow for a little extra space around the trinket.

At this point you can add glitter if you want to have a sparkly rock or paint carefully with acrylic or tempera paint to make it colorful (*Note: we actually added glitter to the dough as we were mixing it). Let the rocks dry in a warm place for two to three days. If you don’t want to wait that long, remove the wax paper and bake for about 20-40 minutes (depending on how wet your dough is) in a 150-degree oven. (Special note: if you are going to bake your rocks, use food coloring instead of paint.)

Once the treasure rocks are cool and hard, kids can use a hammer to smash them open and reveal the prize. This gets a little messy, so it is a good idea to do it outside or on a newspaper-covered floor. And, of course, little fingers need special help using the hammer to make sure the rock is the only thing that gets smashed.

Treasure ideas:

coins folded paper with a special note

plastic figures or toys

costume jewelry

fool’s gold

erasers

small rubber balls

*You may want to wrap these things in a bit of plastic wrap or else plan on washing them well after they are freed from their dirty rock-homes.

Fossils: Another fun use for the rock recipe is making your own fossils. Mix the ingredients in the same way, but flatten the small balls into circles before drying. While the dough is still moist, firmly press your object into the dough and then remove carefully. Once the dough has hardened (or you’ve cooked it like above), you will have a really cool fossil of your very own making! If you want to hang your fossil from a string, make a hole in the dough along the edge before it dries.

Fossil objects:

stiff leaves (bay leaves work well)

dead bugs with hard shells

small bones (like last night’s chicken)

seashells

plastic dinosaur models

twigs

bumpy rocks

[mauimagic]

What a great idea!! Think we'll be doing this in the preschool soon!!

[valerian]

Sounds like fun! My youngest is into rocks and gems at the moment. He wants to go to a mine and dig! We're trying to talk dh into taking us to that diamond park in Arkansas. Ds is convinced that he'll find a huge diamond! LOL!