Dino Day!

Miss L was over the moon happy.  After all my previous posts about dinosaur study ideas, and after listening to my daughter beg over and over again to have a big dinosaur event with her homeschool events, I finally agreed to put one together.  It was a couple days ago and this is a little bit of what it looked like.  I arranged 10 "stations" around the house and outside, with directions posted at each station so kids and parents could do them in whatever order and at their own pace, open-house style.  The stations ranged in complexity from coloring dinosaur pictures in Miss L's room and making dinosaur models out of Lego in K's room to real fossil examination and bone excavation, so no way was I going to herd all those kids through individually. 

The fossil identification station  was a pretty big hit.  A lot of the older kids really liked it.  There's something special about being able to put your hands on the real thing that is so different from reading about it in a book.

It was a station of 24 numbered fossils, with a list of possible fossils you can see on the left side of the photo below.  Just gotta match 'em up!  Some fossils were pretty easy (a clam) and others pretty tricky (crinoid fragments), so I color-coded them with the easiest to hardest to give people a place to start.  Plus handy guidebooks nearby and answers strategically placed if needed. 

My boy liked trouble shooting this table and helping me find all my errors before everyone got there.  There were more than a few of them.  Glad he was helping!

Geography wall.  Matching different dinosaur fossils to where they have been found on the globe. 

Skeleton and bone matching.  Determining which bone belongs to which dinosaur.  Remarkably tricky in real life, I stuck to easier bones for these kids.

Connections between modern birds and dinosaurs.  I punted a little bit on this one, having left it for last in my planning, so basically all I did was find some good pictures of velociraptor, archopteryx, and chicken skeletons online and wrote down some thought questions, and then posted the result on the chicken coop fence.  Good enough.

Dinosaur trackways.  Terra cotta-color air dry clay looks and feels a LOT like mud.  Add some realistic dinosaur toys and you can re-create footprints along a Jurassic shoreline pretty nicely. 

I tried to add some suggestions for making a story with it, like having the tracks of a carnivore hunting a herbivore, but I think most of the kids were too distracted by the pièce de résistance nearby to think very hard about that.

By far the most popular station was the Dino Dig.

To make this station, we cast makeshift T-rex bones in plaster from these molds and buried them in our big ol' sandbox.  Add some shovels and brushes to re-create a real paleontological dig, and you've got a fun afternoon.  If you're wondering why there are no kids in any of the previous photos, this is why.

Tight quarters in that sandbox.  A good time, but busy!  It will be a while before we do this again, but I think Miss L is hoping it might become an annual event.  We'll see, kiddo.  We'll see.