Moving Beyond the Page-Dinosaurs Big and Small

Our unit on The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree didn't happen. This happened instead:

A busted water line in the sink upstairs kind of ruined our plans for the week. I was NOT trying to do school while this was going on.

Our Christmas unit didn't happen, because, well-Lily is 5, and the week of Christmas was just too exciting. The great thing about homechooling, is that when your kid is obviously not paying attention, you can just take an unplanned break. So we did. For a week and a half. And it was AWESOME!

After Christmas, when things were somewhat back to normal (I still have a hole in the ceiling), we were ready to learn about dinosaurs!

The first thing we did was have a dinosaur breakfast: dinosaur egg oatmeal. The eggs hatch when you add hot water, and little candy dinosaurs come out. Lily approved! Yum!

For our sensory bin, we had lots of different dinosaurs, shells, trees and sand. 

We made dinosaur eggs for a snack. Lily loves hard boiled eggs, so this was fun.

This was our first day of the dinosaur unit. Then, we put it off for a week, because this happened:

Yep! We got hit with the flu. Not fun, not awesome. It took several days before either of us felt well enough to continue with school. It's ok, though. The dinosaur unit was right there waiting when we felt like continuing. :)

When Lily felt better, she got to work on a dinosaur excavation kit. This was a lot harder than it looked, so we worked on that for a few days.

We had a dinosaur rock painting kit. Lily had fun painting her rocks to look like dinosaurs and eggs.

 

Before we got started on reading this weeks' book, I dug through our books and found a few more dinosaur books to go along with the unit. 

We talked about the different dinosaurs, and how tall some of them were, and how short others were. We talked about the difference between height and length. We measured Lily to see how tall and long she is, then we measured out the length of some of the different dinosaurs.

 

We made some dinosaur eggs out of a paste of baking soda and water. After the eggs dried for a couple of days, I gave Lily a bowl of vinegar and a dropper, and let her play with them. The eggs "hatched" when the vinegar touched them.

 

We found a few episodes of "Walking with Dinosaurs" on Netflix. Lily's favorite dinosaur is the Brachiosaurus, so we tried to find some episodes with those in them.

One of the activities this week was to make "fossils" out of items around the house and play dough. Lily wanted to use her toy dinosaurs for this activity. This was a favorite activity this week.

Another fun activity was to make dinosaur feet, and act out the movements in a poem about dinosaurs.

We talked about weight and measurements, and about different kinds of scales. We made a balance, and measured out dinosaurs.

We used dinosaurs for math to add numbers up to 10. 

We finished off our unit with a Dino-snack! I washed a couple of dinosaurs and put them in the bottom of the bowl. Then, I put a little chocolate pudding and graham crackers on top of them. Lily got to be a paleontologist and "dig" up her dinosaurs!

Yum! Lily approved of this snack. :)

We also made a dinosaur shadow print,but I didn't get any pictures of that for some reason. 

This was a fun unit. Lily loved learning about the different dinosaurs, and she said that the Sauropod is her favorite, because of their long necks.