Dinos & Fossils

We started off the day with a dinosaur puppet show. I took a bunch of plastic dinosaurs and plants (they have a kit at Walmart for $3) and used green construction paper as my base. We talked about how the dinosaurs lived a long time ago and set up the scene using the plastic dinos and plants. I then used a sheet of brown construction paper that I crumpled into a ball to talk about the theory of a meteorite hitting the earth. I put black construction paper behind all of the plants and dinos and talked about: how the meteorite kicked up a lot of dirt which made it dark, it was so dark that the plants couldn't get enough sunlight (I took all of the plants out of the scene), and then the plant-eating dinosaurs died off (I took all of the plant eaters out), and finally the meat-eating dinosaurs had nothing to eat so they died off as well (I took the rest of the dinos off). It was a great way to introduce the types of dinosaurs as well.

Everyone thought it was great, and then the girls played dinosaur house with all of the pieces. It was really cute to listen to.

We made our own fossils by pressing some of the plastic dinos (seriously, that $3 at Walmart went a long way!) into some slightly wet sand and then poured plaster of Paris over it. I held onto the dinosaurs for our archeological dig on Thursday.

And after reading a few books about dinosaurs, we cut a large dinosaur print out of newspaper and let the kids stand inside it. We then went outside and measured how tall we were compared to a T Rex (75 feet is a long distance down the sidewalk!).

Today, we discussed fossils and all the different types of fossils one can find such as imprints of dinosaur tracks, bones that have changed to rock, insects encased in fossilized tree sap, frozen fossils of whole mammoths, etc.

I let the kids use play dough to make their own imprint fossils. I had originally planned on letting them make handprint impressions to take home, but those quickly were rolled up into "tacos" or cut into shapes of dogs, etc. so I just let them take home the play dough when they were done. Seriously, much more fun! And I forgot how long kids can spend playing with play dough! I finally had to pry them away from the table with the promise of a snack.

We finished the day by heading outside for our own little archeological expedition. In our case, it was a bagful of sand on a tarp with all of their dino fossils from Tuesday hidden inside. I equipped them with toothbrushes (they were amazed to find out that real archaeologists use toothbrushes!) and we headed outdoors.

Everyone had fun excavating their fossils and a couple stayed and played in the sand afterward.

And then of course there was the requisite jumping on the trampoline. It was so nice to have a sunny, warm week!