Dinosaurs

We did Dinosaurs the week after snakes. Again, I had a hard time finding age appropriate non-fiction dinosaur books for my kids. I found as many story books with dinosaurs in it as we could (sorry no book list again! this one was done before the blog too) and I did the best I could with non-fiction books for older kids. We learned what a paleontologist is and the difference between a herbivore and carnivore is. We didn't get into types of dinosaurs too much more than that. We watched a lot of episodes of Dinosaur Train. And I showed them a few documentaries, which they thought were awesome. Although, since they have the attention span of a 4 year old and a 2 year old they didn't pay much attention to those.

We started our week off with a trip to the dinosaur park! (http://thedinosaurpark.com/) It's in Cedar Creek, TX and a lot of fun! It's a walking trail with dinosaurs all along the path way. Each dinosaur has an information for you to read about the species. They also have a fun scavenger hunt set up! At the end there is a playground and a place for the kids to dig up fossils.

Sorry about the weird picture placement. I'm working on it. Somewhere I have a picture of me with my head sticking out of the T-Rex mouth. I'm just not sure where it is.

We spent a lot of time doing dinosaur crafts. We made two different kinds of dinosaur fossils. I have pictures, and instructions. We painted our toy dinosaurs and made foot prints with them. We did some dinosaur counting and I hid little dinosaurs around the house for a dinosaur hunt. It's the same thing as an easter egg hunt, except you don't get candy. Just little dinosaurs. 

Here is one of the fossils we made:

Here is the link for directions I chose to bake mine in the oven for about 30 minutes. Then we let them sit outside for about two hours to finish drying. While we waited I took our leftover sand and dinosaurs and made a little sensory box. It's smaller than I usually do them, but I didn't have a lot of sand. 

Here is Bubba exploring the sand. 

That's our cat Dexter in the back round. This little sand box kept them both really happy while we waited for the fossils to dry. 

The fossils dried and we got to break them up to free the dinosaurs! Bubba was a bit frustrated, it was harder for him to get them out. I helped him, but I couldn't help taking a picture of that face first. 

I gave them both a magnifying glass so they could look a their fossils and explore like real paleontologists. 

We spent a lot of time playing outside with that sand a little dinosaurs, even after the fossils were done. I got it out over the week and they were just as happy with it on other days. 

Kaydence counting dinosaurs 

This sounded like a good idea, but it didn't quite work out. The idea is to freeze the dinosaurs in water, and then free them with paintbrushes or spray bottles. It should be an outside activity, on a hot day. We had a cold front come in and I was just looking for something to keep them busy while I cooked dinner. It backfired big time. The ice took FOREVER to melt. They were bored, and didn't see the point. I ended up pouring warm water in so they would melt and then they just played in the water. 

Cute dinosaur printable back. It's free! Kaydence is cutting lines check it out! 

This is us painting with our dinosaurs. We made the finger paint ourselves. It was a bit clumpy. 

This was our other fossil craft! I liked this one better, and I think the kids did too. Find the instructions here 

And to end our week we went to the Texas Natural Science Center over at UT. It's free and they have real fossils. Kaydence was excited to see them, but less excited once we were there. I find that seeing the bones is one thing, but she likes it more (at this age) to see the real life replicas of a dinosaur. 

It's the greatest state in the USA.

And now we're caught up. In the future my posts won't be this long. I'll spread them out through the week to keep them shorter. We're just trying out a new program, which I will talk about tomorrow!