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.

Notes on Dinosaurs

So, many kids are dino-crazy and want to study them, but a lot of homeschooling parents don't know where to start.  Or after you've whetted a child's appetite by watching Walking with Dinosaurs or some simple dinosaur reader books, where do you go from there?  Last night I met with a few other homeschooling moms to share ideas, run down the basics on dinosaurs to get your feet wet, and give some ideas on books and resources and activities that may help extend and enrich a dinosaur study.  Most of our ideas focused on the elementary years but many are applicable to much older students as well.   I previously posted about some of these resources, but I've expanded the list and added an assortment of themes or "pegs" to help organize your thoughts and activities about dinosaurs.  You can find the outline of what we discussed and a list of resources as a pdf document free to browse or download at the link below.

Notes on Dinosaurs

Drop me a line if you have any questions or would like to discuss ideas.  Enjoy!

Dinosaur (and paleontology) books!

If you have met my daughter, it is no secret that dinosaurs are a big hit around here.  Not too long ago I was asked for a few good places to start for a study of dinos and paleontology.  My picks below range from adult, for the parent that wants some background in these topics, down to the early elementary child in love with dinosaurs.  Most skew late elementary and higher since I don't like to 'dumb down' material for my kids, especially when they show a strong interest and thrive on depth...but that's a topic for another post.


Dinosaurs books for overview and what/where/how:

• Dinosaur Lives by John Horner is a great nonfiction book for adults that gives good insight into both the fieldwork of paleontology and how paleontologists recreate how dinosaurs lived and highly recommended.  It is written for the lay reader but doesn't shy away from some of the more technical ideas.  John Horner is one of the most respected paleontologists currently working and if you are ever in Bozeman, do not miss his Museum of the Rockies.
• Eyewitness Books Dinosaur by David Lambert.   I love all the Eyewitness titles and we have a million of them, but the dinosaur one is a standout.  It is marketed to late elementary/middle school but with the beautiful pictures younger kids like them and there is plenty of information for adults.
• Dinosaur by Stephanie Stansbie is another "kid's" book, but it disguises itself as a paleontologist's notebook and the science is pretty sophisticated.  Tons of little manipulatives and envalopes and flippy bits that could get lost, but my daughter likes it so much she keeps everything where it is supossed to go. 
• There's lots of early elementary-age books on dinosaurs.  Tons.  Too many to list. Many are fine, some are crap.  The books on fossils and paleontology by Aliki are good, and Magic School Bus in the Time of Dinosaurs is probably one of  the best IMO.

Paleontology, paleontologists, and the history of fossil hunting:

• Jack Horner's book Digging Up Dinosaurs is a fun and accurate book about how fossils are really found and studied today. Appropriate for elementary through middle school.
• A good book on paleontology for the middle schooler or the student ready for a step up to more meaty information is Bones Rock!  Everything You Need to Know To Be a Paleontologist.  Lots of examples of real science and great stories.
• Look up books on Mary Anning.  There are several biographies on her life on Amazon for different age groups.  A particularly good one for elementary is Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown.  Mary Anning was an english girl in the 1800s who discovered several species of dinosaurs.  There are lots of books for kids about her,  but this is my favorite--I love all the Don Brown biographies.  Mary Anning was fascinating--for grown-up and high school reading of a novelization of her life, Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier is wonderful.
• Lena loves learning about the T-Rex named Sue, which is the largest, most complete t-rex ever found, now displayed in a museum in Chicago.  There are tons of books about the fossil and those who found her, because it was a very contentious and litigious fossil.  Our favorites are this music cd and Sue Hendrickson's autobiography for kids, My Life as an Explorer.  (bonus, Sue Hendrickson dropped out of highschool and homeschooled herself)  A very good (but long) story of the find for adults is Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Exraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found by Steve Fiffer.
• A wonderful picture book about an early paleontologist and dinosaur reconstructor is The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins.  My daughter loves the pictures in this book and comparing how our ideas of how dinosaurs look has changed over the years.

Fun books that stretch the imagination:

• Dinotopia: A Land Apart in Time by James Gurney and its sequels like Journey to Chandara (but not the novelizations that came out later, those are not good)  we read these at story time for many evenings, they are long but my kids absolutely loved a chapter each night.  It is about some 19th-century explorers who stumble upon a lost continent inhabited by intelligent dinosaurs and humans.  Gorgeous paintings on every page. 
• Uneversaurus by Professor Potts is not fiction, but it works here because it is all about how we imagine the colors of dinosaurs skin.  Fantastic fun because it shows both wild&crazy coloring and more sober information about camoflage.  Good inspiration for art lessons, too. 
• If You Are A Lover of Fossils by Byrd Baylor.  Simply beautiful, a prose-poem about fossils and the connection with the earth and our short lives.

Random stuff:

• Usborne's Dinosaur Jigsaw Atlas  is pretty cool.  Shows where different dinosaurs have been found across the world.  Dinosaurs AND geography AND puzzles!  Score!
• Not a dinosaur, but look up information on the Coelacanth.  This is a fish that was thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs until a few of them were found off the coast of Madagascar in the 1930s.  A great book for adults is A Fish Caught in Time by Samantha Weinberg.
• The Walking with Dinosaurs and Chased by Dinosaurs/Prehistoric Park BBC series shows are great.  My kids have watched them over and Over and OVER.  Chased by Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park are especially fun because a modern zoologist goes back in time to capture some of those CGI dinosaurs, which are pretty well done.