November 04, 2007

Dinosaurs

We've spent two weeks recently on dinosaurs, and here are some of the things we did!

Jacob painted a wooden dino 3D puzzle Candace found for us somewhere. Thankfully it was the T-Rex, the one he likes the best!


Here it is.


And one of the ideas in the unit we did was to bury puzzle pieces in some sand, search for them like real paleontologists do, and try to put them together without directions. This proved to be a lot of fun, but a little more work for me than I intended!

The puzzle had 48 large pieces and I buried them all! (What was I thinking??) They all started in the top two inches of sand, but apparently quickly migrated to deeper sand! After finding about 35, we pulled out the big guns and I used a grown up shovel to turn over the whole sandbox! We did find them all, thankfully, and the sandbox is nice and freshly turned over!



Some counting by 2s practice as we checked and re-checked how many pieces we'd found. (Jacob has had a hard time memorizing these and getting the pattern. After this day, he came in and they were on his Math sheet for that day. He actually got it!! The concept sunk in and has lasted!)


Jacob putting together his puzzle with no picture to look at.


And our finished product!


We made our own fossil and let it dry out.


We got a set of play dinosaurs and have had lots of scavenger hunts too. This has been good for me. Jacob has wanted to take turns hiding them, and I've struggled to find them! It's always a good thing to end up in the position of your student! (And it's been a great opportunity for the "playing" I posted about last week.)

And finally, Jacob wrote his first report! He chose the Tyrannosaurus Rex to do his report on. We had a form to complete and he found the information in his different books we had. He did really well and seemed to enjoy this! As we went through the week, he'd notice something and say, "Mom, I need to put that in my report!" We didn't get all those things added in, but still might. And I'd like for him to color it too, but who knows if that will happen either! (You can see Mattie did a small bit for him...)


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