DINOSAURS: PK-4

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Ana's Week

A year later, and Aria still seems to love dinosaurs just as much as she did our very first week of Pre-K 3. So, of course we had to spend a week this fall learning about and playing with dinosaurs! This week was made all the better and more successful not only because of an awesome idea I took and adapted from the amazing Jessica, but also due to the opening of a dinosaur theme park 30 minutes north of Columbus. Spending a day at the end of the week surrounded by animatronic dinosaurs, riding them, and doing a paleontology dig, was the icing on the cake to a fun week. We also made and played in a dinosaur garden in our backyard. Though I most definitely took the idea from Jessica, who has a bigger and more intricate garden than us, we adapted our garden for our smaller yard and built it inside of a repurposed old fire pit. Both girls love playing in the garden together, digging up bones or making up stories about the dinosaurs. While Aria may not know all of the dinosaur names yet, she ended the week knowing more about the dinosaurs and their names, how they may have died, and fossils than last year, so I count the week as an overall success.

Some of the best activities of the week involved making our own fossils and paleontology digs in the backyard. We once again made coffee fossils and playdough fossils, because those ideas are simply too easy and awesome not to repeat. We also made our own dig using cornstarch and water and burying the dinosaur bones in the mixture before it hardened outside. Awesome concept because it looked super real, and it was a lot easier for Aria to dig the bones out than in the kits you can buy at the store. The girls also loved that when they were done digging and started to wash the bones off, it turned into a slime mixture. Basically, the activity created hours of fun. A paleontology dig in the sandbox is an easy way to play pretend during this week too!

Another awesome activity that we did was a volcano science activity where we set off lava eruptions. We talked about different ways that dinosaurs might have died, read Whatever happened to the dinosaurs? by Bernard Most, and set off different volcano eruptions over and over again using the pocket volcano kit (which we found at Hobby Lobby). Totally worth the $5 because we were able to do counter eruptions, water eruptions, and even take it into the bath and watch it erupt! Aria couldn’t get enough of the volcano, and in the process we were learning about how different chemicals react together, different hypotheses on how dinosaurs went extinct, and the names of baking products. Win all around!
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Aria said that the only problem with the unit this week was that she wasn’t able to dig real dinosaur bones out of the backyard. I guess I should probably keep a close eye on her at this point out to make sure I don’t find her outside trying to dig up her own “Ariasaurus” like Curious George in Curious George Dinosaur Discovery! But hey, maybe one day Aria will become a paleontologist, discover a new dinosaur species, and in her speech attribute her passion for dinosaurs to her preschool dinosaur units many years ago. A mom can dream…

Jessica's Week:

​I love that these themed weeks can spark or reignite so many great interests in our littles! That was definitely the case for us this week. Taegan has gotten so into "my little pony" and princesses and all the other popular girly stuff she had kind of gotten bored with her dinosaur garden and wasn't really interested in this subject anymore. I actually debated if I should even keep it as a theme bc I didn't want her to be fighting against me all week but we had so many great resources. A lot of time and energy went into collecting them so I couldn't talk myself into dropping it, instead I took a different approach. I tried to frontload the week with some of the most fun activities such as setting off the paper mache volcano we made last year and playing paleontologist digging for fossils in our sand bin to capture her interest. Fortunately, it didn't take long before she was asking, "How big were the dinosaurs? Where did they live mom?". Instead of simply answering I tried to respond to each question with a "let's find out" activity. We measured our house and compared it to a dinosaurs size, we read a creationist book together about possible extinction explanations, we built a dinosaur habitat based on a Mesozoic era garden we saw at the conservatory. When T ran out of questions I tried asking her some. "Do you know which Dinosaurs were carnivores? Would you like to find out?" Or "What is this dinosaur's name? Do you think we can find his picture on our name cards?"  Switching my phrasing just the tiniest bit seemed to give my headstrong daughter just enough of the control she craves to keep her focused and on track. Of course what works this week probably won't next week but we are all just taking it one day at a time...or at least trying to lol. This week was particularly one day or sometimes hour at a time because I was trying to get all the last minute birthday party preparation complete and still struggling to adjust to a new Montessori school schedule. It is seeming more and more like part time Montessori, while great in theory, takes up a greater amount of my time than it frees. I'm still happy for the social interaction Taegan is receiving and the fact that I get to shop by myself but between the drive time and extra room mom duties I feel more burdened than I did with homeschool alone. Hopefully this is just an adjustment period for us but if that proves untrue I'm highly considering going back to solely homeschool or a co-op next year.