Dinosaurs On Parade!

I teach in a town where there is a huge Dinosaur Museum, and they are a really Big THING. As such, I've got a lot of kids who are REALLY in to them. So last November, we spent a month learning all about the Dinos! FYI: Brontosaurus no longer exists, and dinosaur names can be ridiculously hard to pronounce. It's even better when you're corrected by a 5 year-old on said pronunciation.

We started out by creating a "Dinosaur" Alphabet. I used this activity on PBS from the show Dinosaur train. We watched the above video, and then made our own alphabet in which I took the pictures from the website and drew them bigger on a piece of paper (with the help of my lovely sister!) . Each student colored in a page, and then we got to that letter in the song, they had to lift their page above their heads. I first put them up on the board and I later made it into a dinosaur book for our classroom!

 

At the time we were working on patterns. I have a kit of small different colored plastic dinosaurs ao I then took some home and took some pictures to make up some pattern cards: 

They then used the actual dinosaur manipulatives to complete the patterns and then went on to create some of their own. I used this as one of variety of centers that also included matching dinosaur models to molds, a color word activity and some great dinosaur puzzles supplied by my EA.

I found this great activity on a blog somewhere but I can't for the life of me remember where I got it! I found some rough estimates of the size of some dinosaur's feet and then made a life size model out of construction paper and laminated them. We then measured them using our shoes! They took them off (with lots of giggles about stinky feet!) and we recorded how many fit on each feet. It gave them a great idea of relative size. We also all laid down head to toe and we were about the same length as a T-Rex!

Another one of my favorite activities that we did during this unit was an art project in which we created our own dinosaur skeletons. As drawing the bones or bodies would be a little too hard for some of the little ones in November, I drew a few different dinosaur skeletons (T-Rex, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Pterodactyl and Apatosaurus). I then cut them up by tails, bodies, front legs, arms/back legs, necks and heads. I then photocopied enough that each table could have a variety of bones to choose from (each part had to be from a different dino) . They then cut them out, and arranged them to look like a dinosaur on some black construction paper. After they glued them down I helped them come up with some names for their dinosaurs (some of which were hilarious)! Here are the bone pages I made and the final products:

 

                

             Rib Cages                                          Back Legs

                 Front Legs                                             Necks

                     Tails                                                Heads