Dinosaur and the Land Before Time

Thursday, September 11, 2014

My son is obsessed with dinosaurs. Majority of the books he borrowed from the library is about dinosaurs. His birthday cake was decorated with dinosaurs. So when he begged that we’ll play with dinosaurs, I couldn’t resist. He reads his dinosaur books every night and is eager to learn all about the beginning of times. So considering all these factors, I put up an afterschool learning activity about the geological times and the era of dinosaurs.

Here are the activities we worked on this unit study.

Geological Time

This topic deserves a separate post. But here’s a preview of what we did here. My son is obsessed with the books that you see in the picture. It is a three book series which tells the story of the beginning of time, from the big-bang to the appearance of humans. Now, using these books we traced the geological period from the creation of the stars and planets to the first humanoid.

Dinosaur Family Tree

Another topic which I will have a separate post as well. My son’s fascination with dinosaurs started this year and so far he has memorized the names of all the dinosaurs that appeared in the books which I shared at the very end of this post. He’s been watching Walking With Dinosaurs non-stop and Dinosaur Train. He wants to be a paleontologist and would make videos of dinosaur stories.

With this “burst” of interest, I gave him a challenging task of forming the Dino-Family tree using the cheat-sheet and our dinosaur figures.

Periods of the Dinosaur

We’ve done this activity a couple of times but I always add it whenever we re-visit dinosaur study. For this year, the focus was for him to tell the difference between the three periods (time and the characteristics of dinosaurs living in that period).

Learning About Dinosaurs

I created the dinosaur fact cards that he uses during his playtime and which he also brings to school with him on some occasions. You can buy the up to date version of these Dinosaurs Montessori 3 Part Cards and Information Cards printable from my shop by clicking the image below:

Dinosaurs Montessori 3 Part Cards and Information Cards

Dinosaur Information Cards and Worksheet

You can get the FREE Dinosaur activity sheet (fact sheet) from here. I made this printable so I can train Mavi to “record” the information about his dinosaurs.

Currently, our dino collection is composed of Safari Toob Dinos and Safari Toob Feathered Dinosaurs.

Dinosaur Fossils

I got Mavi an air dry clay from the craft store and we made dinosaur fossils. This was a fun activity for both of us as we are trying to make the “best looking fossil ever”. I realize that it was actually hard to make a realistic dino fossil LOL.

When they dried up, I made Mavi paint the fossil light brown to make it similar to those in the museum.

But he had plans of his own :) According to Mavi, the blue ones where fossils discovered in water, the red in volcanoes, the green and yellow in the mountains and the brown ones were excavated from he ground.