D is for Dinosaur

Whew, got pretty behind on the blog!  Our recent dinosaur unit was a favorite around here.  My son had gone through a very big (i.e. obsessive) dinosaur phase, and we brought a lot of those toys and books with us when we moved here to Nepal, so we had some fun things to pull out.  He has since moved on to fixate on superheroes, but he still does really enjoy dinosaurs anytime we talk about them.

There was a lot going on when we were working on this unit.  Our sweet and beloved neighbors were preparing to move away, but the girls had a stretch of time off from their school before leaving, so they joined us for some dino fun.  My parents arrived for their first visit to Nepal near the start of the unit.  So, even though the units are designed for 6 days (and we often do them in 5), it stretched out and was a bit less focused this time!  But, we had lots of fun!

The neighbor girls were eager to take part in fossil cookie making!

Here are their cookies.  We used our toy dinosaurs on some to make footprints or whole body indents for our fossils, and then we also used our dinosaur cookie cutters to make a few.

We measured some dinosaur toys with unit cubes.

Grandma and Grandpa helped us to make some salt dough fossils.  Isaiah (man of vision for big projects!) got in his mind to make fossils to compose an entire skeleton.

I buried our fossils in cloud dough, and they "excavated" them.

Here is my little paleontologist setting out all of his fossils after the excavation.

Yes, he did convince me to try to make a whole skeleton.  It was in no way part of my original plan, but he got so excited about it and wanted to make his own museum display, so I went with it!  I pulled out my little mini glue gun, plugged it in through a converter and went to town trying to make his salt dough bones fit together.  Kind of worked, huh?

Of course, when little one saw big brother's skeleton, he wanted one, too.  His was a little harder to pull off because he had not made fossils with the intent to put them together, but he also is far less picky about details of how things turn out, so he was pleased with the random collection of salt dough blobs I glued together for him!  

The boys each dictated a little sign for their museum displays.   (With my parents here, I actually got a photo of ME doing school with the boys!)

 They were very proud putting it all together!