DINOSAUR WEEK!

Dinosaur Week!

  

The kids and I were so excited to start dinosaur week. We began our week by pulling out our kids dictionary and looking up the meaning of the words 'Dinosaur' and 'extinct.' Then we read in our cool Dinosaur Encyclopedia about what a dinosaur is, the different kinds of dinosaurs and the time periods in which they lived. We learned about the insides of a dinosaur what type of food they ate depending on their teeth. Why some were small and some very large, some fast runners and others slow. How they lived and that they mysteriously disappeared.

I love using workbooks to teach mostly because its fun. For example, I found a dinosaur workbook from Target at the beginning of the year and saved it for this week as a daily activity for Jr.'s work-boxes. It covered everything from learning about different types of dinos, fun mazes, a word search and connect-the-dots. AND I laminated most it so we can reuse it in the future!

For our daily reading we enjoyed a cute Dr. Seuss book entitled "Oh Say Can You Say Dinosaur." The book does a great job of breaking down the pronunciation of the dino names. Plus the boys always find it hilarious at the end of the book where the 'cat-in-the-hat-a-saur-us' appears!

On Tuesday we practiced painting and coloring by number dinosaur pages of the boys choosing. Jr. especially likes color by number because it he's so left-brained when it comes to organization and logic when coloring. My little engineer is more right-brained and artistic using whatever colors he pleases- that or he's just too young to care;)

Later in the week we used Play-Dough to mold into dinosaurs. Unfortunately I didn't get any usable pictures of the boys doing this activity but it was still a lot of fun. We also pretend played as dinosaurs. And let me tell you that walking on all four and pretending to eat leaves from a tree was a real hoot and seriously funny. Then I had Jr. try out his Dino-Doodling book with ink pens. One particular pic goal was to try and finish drawing the scales on the dinosaur. Then we talked about how dinosaurs' skin might have felt.

On Tuesday and Thursday the boys took turns using the LeapPad to learn more about dinosaurs. The dinosaur book takes you on a journey with 'Leap' the frog through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous time periods to return a baby dinosaur to his homeland. Super cute and fun. Even my Tiny Queen Bee sat on the couch with us to listen to the story. Interactive toys work great to capture my kids attention and as a added bonus its not tv. Yay! On Thursday Jr. used a different book about dinosaurs from a general Kindergarten phonics LeapPad book, also cute and fun.

 And the denouement...
An actual dinosaur DIG! Given as a gift last Christmas it was the perfect way to end the week. A little messy, YES, but so worth it. The dig activity came with a big chuck of plaster with bones buried inside. The tools were actually a little insufficient in getting the job done so I donated some scrapbooking tools to the boys. Jr. worked hard to clean the pieces once we dug them out and my Little Engineer worked hard chipping away at that thing for at least an hour. Once we had all the pieces we put it together and the boys were SO proud, as was I. Oh and fyi, the toddler was napping away in her crib while we pounded loudly with a hammer for 90 minutes;)

The boys were great about keeping this goggles on.

Jr. cleaning the remaining plaster off the pieces.

The Little Engineer chipping away!

Figuring out how the dinosaur went together was quite a task.

Delicately holding the model of the Brachiosaurus.

Little's turn.

Both boys we SO excited to see the final project.

 I was very proud of the boys for being patient in this project because it took a lot longer than I had anticipated at the beginning. So to see it finally compete was just awesome. I recommend having a dinosaur week with your kiddos especially if homeschooling boys. They really need these hands on activities that let them explore their natural 'wild at heart' side.

That wraps up our dinosaur week. In the future we might try adding some harder things like a trip to a museum where they can actually see some molds of bones, we'll see. But for now the week was a success, even with so much to do. Keeping the boys interested was not a problem and it really was a blessing to see so many 'ah ha' moments.