All About Dinosaurs

As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been learning about dinosaurs the last few weeks. Along with checking out every book and movie we could find at the library, we bought and played Dinosaur Bingo, found fossils at a local State Park, (see my post about fossils), found a book with facts and games for my son’s Leap Pad (pre-Ipad type of electronic book), and played again and again with his tiny plastic dinosaurs! Though not as bad as Legos, they still really hurt when stepped on!

I’m glad we at least found some fossils. I looked up local museums for dinosaurs and could only find the Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, which has a small fossil dig exhibit or the San Fransisco Academy of Science, which has one dinosaur skeleton. We did go there last spring and we’ve been to the other many times (see pics and other great local field trips). I heard there’s a small fossil museum in or near Fresno and if we travel through soon we will stop there, but I’m not driving all the way there just for that! Anyway, I was disappointed there is no museum all about dinosaurs nearby.

But, of course, we also did some fun art and craft projects!

Clay dinosaurs with pine cone spines. Okay, I thought pine cones would be easy to break pieces off of. Seems like they are always breaking apart on their own when I’m doing other craft projects with them! This one we used was a super cone! I used scissors, pliers, and ended up with many too smashed up to use at all, but finally got enough for a few rows on our dinos backs. What can I say, once I started, I was determined!

painting tip: I give the kids paper plates rather than cups for paint, so I can just toss it when done.

Homemade fossils! Rolled clay into a small ball and then pressed little shells into it to make our own fossil prints. My son also rolled out some long pieces of clay and just let them dry that way. He said they are dinosaur bones!

Scored this wooden stegosaurus kit at a dollar store and quickly realized why it ended up there! The directions were wrong! The pieces were numbered, but there were a few that were screwy! Like two pieces with the same number, so would have needed to fit it the same spot and some that fit in and then later another piece was supposed to go in that was already used somewhere else! We finally just guessed and put them how we thought they might fit, like real paleontologists! I think we had more fun than if it went together easily!