Dinosaurs

Hannah chose dinosaurs for her next unit of study.  Problem:  when we did our book sort we came up with just five dinosaur books at our house and none of them were non-fiction.  Library to the rescue!  Our library has learning kits that contain books, CDs, DVDs, and action rhymes.  We checked out two dinosaur kits plus some other books.  Hannah liked "Tyrannosaurs Rex up Close" and Olive liked "Dinosaur Roar!" the best.  They both enjoyed Sesame Street dinosaurs and Dinosaur Train DVDs.  Hannah didn't really like the action rhymes, although I thought they were cute.  We spent most of our learning times reading books and looking at pictures.  Hannah was really good at noticing small differences between the dinosaurs.  She saw Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus  were different because of the bumps on their heads.  I never noticed that before.

Playing with dinosaurs at the library.  Did I mention our library is awesome?

 

We tried making dinosaur tracks by cutting out cardboard feet, but it was more fun to make Hannah tracks.  Then we made prints from leaves and other things in the yard.
 

Hannah's favorite activity: digging dinosaurs out of play-dough and making imprint fossils.
 

 

I bought these little dinosaurs for our unit and Hannah loves playing pretend with them.  We also sorted them into groups of herbivore/carnivores and number of legs.  Here she made a pattern with them.
 

 Another purchase was a kid's tape measure so we could plot the length of dinosaurs in our backyard.  It's never too young to get kids started measuring things.  They love it and it's a real world skill.  

I think could have studied dinosaurs forever, but when our library books were due I told her it was time to choose something else.  Next unit:  bugs!