Ending our Dinosaur Unit

We are wrapping up our last week of dinosaur science! Today we learned about the triceratops, made dinosaur tracks, measured a t-rex foot with non-standard unit (cubes), and listened to dinosaur songs!

More Dinosaur Fun

Dinosaurs is one of my favorite science units to teach, there is so much to learn and so many fun activities to do! The best part is that the kids get so excited and so into it. 

They were very excited about these glitter dinosaurs, they helped us learn the names of different dinosaurs and also work on our fine motor skills with having to cut such little details. 

 

...glitter is my favorite color! 

We made dinosaur hats which inspired lots of fun dinosaur imaginative play. 

  

And we made paleontologists which will hold the journal pages for our writing about dinosaurs, the pages fit right inside the jacket of the paleontologist. 

Each week we will learn about a different dinosaur, this week we learned about a bubble map and wrote facts about a t-rex.

Jurassic Park Science

I planned a Jurassic Park themed science afternoon inspired by Elementary Shenanigans post.  I've been really excited about the idea of "setting the stage to engage" lately. This entails background sounds, hands on activities, costumes, props and flipping the classroom to look like a new environment. 

To set the stage here, I turned our desks into Jeeps and gave them all worker hats with Jurassic Park symbols on them. I put a big picture of dinosaurs on the board and played rainforest background noise. 

 I ordered a block with t-rex bones in it and they used tools and water to extract the bones.

 

 

 

We had dinosaur snot to play with! I made a Borax based slime with yellow liquid watercolor. 

 

  

We pressed dinosaurs into play dough to see what their fossils would look like. 

 

 

We discovered dinosaur bones from a stegosaurus in sand and then tried to assemble our 3D puzzle. 

 

Our final and most popular activity was dinosaur dung.  I used brownie mix for the dung and made two trays, one for a carnivore and one for an herbivore.  I put leaves, berries, and sticks in one and plastic bones and feathers in the other. They had to identify which dung was an herbivore and which was a carnivore.