We continued on in our prehistory study and we have finally reached dinosaurs! I decided to deviate slightly from my plan since I found that most of my resources are not divided by Period, but instead dinosaurs are all lumped together or they are divided by characteristics (meat eaters, plant eaters, crests and beaks, spikes and horns, etc.).
We started with an overview of dinosaurs. We read though our Usborne Internet-Linked 1st Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life. We discussed what is a dinosaur and what made them different than the animals that came before them. We played What Is A Dinosaur game at the Canadian Museum of Nature website. This game shows pictures of eight different prehistoric creatures. The object is to chose the ones that are not dinosaurs. Each right or wrong answer brings up information about the animal. After all the non-dinosaurs are removed, questions can be answered to put dinosaurs in their place. Both correct and incorrect answers bring up more information about dinosaurs. Computer games are always a big hit with George so we ended up playing this a couple of times.
We then discussed the Era (Mesozoic) and three time periods (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous) that dinosaurs lived. We added stickers to the timeline from our Magic School Bus Back in Time with the Dinosaurs kit.
I then pulled out all the cards for those three periods from our Charlie’s Playhouse Ancient Creature Cards and mixed them all up. I showed one card at a time to George and had him find it on the timeline. After reading about the creature, I had him name the period it came from and place it in the correct pile. By the time we were done, George was able to easily pronounce all three period names.
I placed our many dinosaur books into a bin and allowed the kids to pick out which book they wanted to read to finish up our day. George chose Oh Say Can You Say Dinosaur! by Bonnie Worth from the Cat in the Hat Learning Library. George is a big fan of the Cat in the Hat and loves the Learning Library series of books. He was able to read most of the book himself but got tired about 3/4 of the way through so I finished reading it out loud.
We will continue with our dinosaur study for however long it takes to get through all our planned activities.
We will begin our study of dino on Monday. This will be an introductory lesson as they are still young to recall all that would be great to know.
ReplyDeleteI have racked my brain and finally have come up w/ a plan to teach them a time line. If it works we will be able to successfully begin the dino lessons.
I too see that they are clumped by their intake more than time in what I have found. Fortunate for me that my son loved dinos too so i still have lots left. Of course since then they have found more and renamed many.
Looks like a great study. I love finding interactive sites online. Looks like you found a great one.
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