We finally finished our dinosaur unit study that little Miss Kiana requested.
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| Easton with his friends, Joshua and Caleb, and the finished T-Rex model |
We read lots of books including creationist perspectives like Ken Ham's
D is for Dinosaur and
What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs and the incredibly cool
Dinosaurs Unleashed by Kyle Butt and Eric Lyons.
The little kids also thoroughly enjoyed the excuse to watch a "school movie" with
Dinosaurs, Genesis and the Gospel from Answers in Genesis.
While the study was geared to the younger children, the big kids just had to get in on fun times like pretending to be paleontologists, carefully excavating toy dinosaurs from chunks of ice.
They all had so much fun patiently removing ice with spray bottles, eye droppers, and plastic knives.
I got this idea from Sharla at
The Chaos and the Clutter and it was a great hit.
I also picked up an excavation kit from which the kids could collect the bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was a little bigger project than I anticipated as they had to carefully pick away at the hardened sand-type substance and carefully brush away the resulting dust.
Fortunately, the kids had a succession of friends over and they are all home educated as well, so they jumped right into the project. I didn't get pictures of Trey and Easton working on it, but Trey enjoyed it so much, he put a dinosaur kit on his Christmas wish list.
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| No, there's nothing wrong with Tyrell's head--he just wanted to wear a band-aid. |
Above, Easton, Kiana and Tyrell are working diligently with their friends Justin and Cadie.
Later in the day the big girls got involved, so Briana and her friend Ellie helped the younger kids.
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| Easton and Justin taking another crack at it. |
Finally, the day Joshua and Caleb came over to visit, the boys got it finished and put all the pieces together. Other fun dinosaur activities included measuring out sizes of various dinosaurs outside, making dinosaurs and footprints out of modeling clay, reading classic dinosaur story books (like Danny and the Dinosaur) and drawing and coloring lots of dinosaurs using a step-by-step book I have.
Looks like a cool study, but I was most entertained by Tyrell's band-aid on his head! Too funny!!!!
ReplyDeleteI love that you let your kids choose their unit studies. (I think that's so important!)
ReplyDeleteWe just did used an excavation kit for Egypt and Bookworm1 LOVED it! Such fun.
wow - they have much more patience than I do! =) looks like a fun week.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun unit study! Do y'all live anywhere near fossilized dinosaur tracks or a dig? Next time you come to TX, maybe you could spend a day at Glen Rose. There are dinosaur and human footprints in the same track! The Paluxy River has so many. The older I get and with each time I go out there, I'm in awe that God has revealed (parts of river bed were washed away and tracks were discovered) this bit of Bible history to us. We may not have easy access to the "Holy Land" but to think, "THIS is where dinosaurs actually walked!!!"
ReplyDeleteWaco also has the Mammoth site where a herd of mammoths died and the bones became fossilized. Baylor University probably has a link to it for further study.
Benjamin does the same thing with Bandaids. That's okay because my first child refused them, thinking the injury was worse if it needed patching. Saved a boatload of money on her! hehe
This could be a fun article to use as a complement to a Dinosaur Unit. It investigates whether or not Jurassic Park could happen in real life!
ReplyDeletehttp://everydayeinstein.quickanddirtytips.com/could-jurassic-park-really-happen.aspx