Dinosaurs

so.much.fun.

I feel like these 3 days summed up why I love play-based learning. I feel like I taught so much, and they learned so much, and we mostly just played! I doubt they soaked it all in, but we just had so much fun exploring this great dinosaur theme. Honestly, dinos aren't my favorite, but I did it because kids love them, and they really did!

Dramatic Play/Blocks area
I brought the sand table inside and each day we were paleontologists working. The first day looked like this:

Inviting, I know. These are dinosaur eggs made from mud, with some flour and salt mixed in to make them stick together better. They were so excited to crack them open and find baby dinosaurs inside. They immediately took them to the block area where the big dinosaurs were and the real fun began.


They paired up the babies to their moms that looked similar (most of the time) and formed little families. Pretty soon dinosaurs were attacking each other, so I suggested we find a way to protect our babies from the other dinosaurs. Pretty soon we were building nests out of legos for the babies. The babies in the nests even invited other dino babies over for play dates. I agreed that dinosaurs may have liked to play with friends too.


We had so many great discussions in this play time. First of all, we talked about dinosaurs protecting themselves and their babies from predators. We pointed out their horns or spiked tails, or long strong tails and neck, or claws, etc that they could use to fight off another dinosaur. This also caused them to build nests, which I'm sure dinosaurs did. We talked about being in large groups to protect each other too, and they all put the babies in the middle with the adults on the outside. Great instincts. We also got into discussions about meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs (which was a great intro to our first 2 days of snack). The stegosaurus was attacking my T-Rex babies and I explained that that probably wouldn't have happened, because stegosarus was a plant-eater and didn't attack other dinosaurs. I could tell that by their flat teeth. So, we found the sharp-toothed dinosaurs, like the T-Rexes, and decided they would probably be the attackers since they had sharp teeth to eat other dinosaurs. Well, the T Rexes were soon ravaging lego nests the others got to work defending themselves and their young. They had the best time. I was right in there with them, protecting my baby dinosaurs, and loving how much we had learned together. It was so much more hands-on and effective than it would have been had I just read those facts out of a book. This similar play happened all 3 days. One day, we even built a big block castle to defend our babies.

Day 2 the sand table was like this:

Dino bones. We had brushes and they were so curious why we were using brushes. I showed them in a book called Digging up Dinosaurs how paleontologists used brushes to dig up bones so they wouldn't break them. Putting the bone puzzles together was hard (ages 3 and up yet I even struggled) and I pointed out several times how hard it must be for paleontologists to put dinosaur bones together too. I labeled them with letters so I would know which bones went to which dino and they were great at sorting them into piles by letter so I could help them put them together. Great math sorting skills. They also liked to just rebury them for each other and play in the sand! This was another day I felt great about teaching them facts within their real play.

Day 3 was the same bones in the sand, but I also added dino eggs to the block center, and had the babies inside.

All the dinos, babies, and eggs were soon in the sand table and we were all there, pretty much the whole hour. The eggs could be matched together by capital and small letters to add in some literacy too. I also pointed out the bones glowed in the dark, and we were back and forth from the storage room watching bones glow for awhile there.



We also had these great dino hats in dramatic play that they loved playing with.



Thank goodness for Dollar Tree for these hats, all our dino toys, bones, eggs, and chalk boards!

Those activities took most our time, but here's some other things we did (thanks pinterest!):

Art
Q-tip painted a dinosaur from here
 Watercolor painted on magically-appearing dinosaur skeletons, found here
 Playdough fossils of bugs and bones

Small manipulatives
Lacing cards
 
Dinosaur chalk boards
 
D is for Dinosaur pebble matching found here
 
Dinosaur math puzzles
 
p.s. I already owned these, and love them, but you can go to the same link above for the pebble activity to print some at home to do. Such a great number sequencing activity.

Snack
This was another time to squeeze some learning into a real-life, fun activity. I reminded them of our play and that some dinos ate plants, and others ate meat. I told them day 1, that we were going to be herbivores, and we said that word over and over. As plant-eaters, we ate some spinach (dipped in Ranch) and I was shocked how much they loved it. As a picky eater, I never would have done that as a kid! We then ate some other plants: cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, bananas and carrots. It was all on the table to take and eat as they wanted and they seriously kept taking more and more and ate almost all of it! It was the longest snack we'd ever had, but I didn't stop them since they enjoyed it so much.
Day 2, we were meat-eaters and learned the word carnivore. We felt T-Rex teeth and Triceratops teeth and talked about how you could tell which dino ate meat, and which ate plants. As meat eaters, we ate yummy chicken nuggets with dipping sauces, as any great dinosaur would have done. :)

Large Group
We did so much great learning and exploring dino facts in play and snack, large group was mainly used to mix in some social learning and math, with a dino theme.
Day 1, we read Mine-o-saur (which, I'll be honest, my daughter could benefit from more than any other child in the class). You can read it free online here. We talked about sharing as we went along, and how the other dinos felt when the Mine-o-saurus wouldn't share. It was a great extension of our sharing talks from Friends week. We then practiced taking turns and sharing with a spinner graph game found here. We spun, then colored in a graph and saw which dino won. Simple, but they were into it and learned about graphing!
 
Day 2, we read 10 Little Dinosaurs, and worked on our numbers and counting. We used our poem, 5 Enormous Dinosaurs to practice numbers 1-5 and counting backwards. We also made a number line to 10, and used it to help us get our math dino puzzles in order 1-10. We also had to review sharing, as we felt the need to hoard puzzle pieces to ourselves instead of putting them in the puzzle. Ah, 3-year-olds.
Day 3, we danced to Dinosaur-rumpus and then learned about fossils. We had made some with play dough during self-select time, and now made more with play dough stuck to my easel. We put all sorts of things into it to see what made the best prints. They then got to choose what to use for their fossils, and they were all so different! They are now drying, so watch for their salt dough fossils coming home next Monday.
 
salt dough recipe:
2 cups flour
1 cup salt
3/4 cup water
 
Outside!
Just had to throw this in here, because we are back outside! And not the end-of-the-day-spend-15-minutes-getting-dressed-just-to-freeze-anyway kind of outside. We actually went outside after snack, played awhile on real grass in the real sun, and then came back for small group. We are all happier people because of this. We found flowers sprouting and tons of deer poop (they are so thrilled with this and search for it everywhere), and just ran and played like kids should. Loved it. Today we even made a volcano inside. I told them all about it at snack and thought I'd gotten them excited, but as soon as we wre outside, some were pretty scared. They hadn't paid attention to the pretend-in-a-styrofoam-cup explanation of our volcano, so I had to explain again to convince them to come watch. It was about as exciting as pouring red vinegar into a cup of baking soda gets, but they went crazy over it. They all had to touch it (and were warned about the vinegar smell on their hands) and we ended up doing it 4 times, all with the same stoked reaction. It was great. I love outside time!