Two Little Monkeys...: Dinosaurs

My backlog of updates continues - February's unit study was all about dinosaurs! This focus was inspired by a preschool science class that was offered through our homeschool group. It was on dinosaurs and I knew Reece would need some prior knowledge to enjoy attending. Plus, he learned the difference between a paleontologist and an archaeologist, an important distinction for the son of the latter. We collected a big pile of books and started exploring.

Reading Prehistoric Actual Size to a captive, but willing audience.

We bought a pretty awesome set of feathered dinosaurs which happily included Reece's favorites - the velociraptor and protoceratops. Reece has started to really enjoy puzzles, so we added this dinosaur one to our collection. Reece really enjoys his USA map placemat that he got for his birthday, so we ordered this dinosaur one below. It's an easy, fun way to keep talking about the topic we're learning about and it occasionally prevents other "creative" mealtime behaviors.

We made salt-dough fossils for each of his toy dinosaurs. Reece figured out quickly that he needed to do a few impressions for each dinosaur to show all of its body parts. He made footprints, headprints, bodyprints, etc.

After the fossils baked and hardened, we made a dinosaur sensory bin. It is filled with oats, rocks, and toy dinosaurs. The fossils are hidden underneath. Later on, we added plastic easter eggs so that Reece could have baby dinosaurs hatch. I thought he would want to match the fossils to the plastic dinosaurs, but he wasn't too interested in that.

Before beginning the excavation

Using a paintbrush to excavate a fossil

Reece attended the dinosaur class at a local science store, which turned out to be a little bit lame. He had fun though and had the experience of sitting in a group and listening to the teacher, with mom just outside the room. Unlike just about all of his friends who go to preschool and drop-off ballet classes, Reece hasn't done this much. He did really well.

Not great picture from my phone, but Reece is on the left in the blue shirt and mostly sitting in his chair.

The highlight of our unit was a family trip to the Peabody Museum at Yale. This was an impromptu outing - had we thought about it much more we probably wouldn't have decided that a 4 hour round trip sounded like a fun Saturday. But it was!