Preschool: Dinosaurs

On Wednesday for preschool, we were still learning about the letter D, so we did a Dinosaur Theme. We talked all about dinosaurs, the different kinds, what they eat, how big they were, etc. We talked about how big their teeth were. Then I sent the kids on a dinosaur tooth hunt to find huge dinosaur teeth all over the house. They brought them back to this giant mouth and we taped them on to make a giant dinosaur mouth. Then all the kids sat inside the mouth as if the dinosaur was eating them!!

We talked about how dinosaurs are extinct and that they all died. Their bodies decayed, but their bones were still in the ground. We read some books about how people will "excavate," or dig in the ground to find their bones, and put them together to make dinosaur skeletons. So next, we ventured to become paleontologists and excavated for dinosaur bones outside in the dirt. (I put chicken bones in the dirt for them to find). They loved it!

Gabe found a dinosaur bone!!

Kye found a dinosaur bone!!

Since we had excavated outside, we then came inside and excavated chocolate chips and M&Ms with toothpicks out of our cookies for snack.

I dug up the shape of a dinosaur footprint in our dirt outside and told them that a dinosaur had come through our city. They were so excited!! They were not sure if it was real or not, but it looked real, and they were just amazed! So they each got a "daddy shoe" and we measured the footprint to see how many daddy's shoes it would take to make a dinosaur footprint. We figured out that it took exactly 6 daddy's shoes.

I put tape down on the patio and said that this is how tall a dinosaur is (hypothetically). I had them all lay down head to toe to find out how many kids it would take to be as tall as a dinosaur. We figured out that it took exactly 8 kids to be as tall. They were really interested in this and stayed put on the ground until we had found the number of kids. It was a lot of fun!

Our Chart to show how many kids it took to be as tall as a dinosaur, and how many shoes it took to be as long as a dinosaur footprint.