Exploring the World of Dinosaurs

The preschoolers have been engaging in lots of fun, hands-on dino explorations. Come and check it out!

Digging for Fossils

The children were so excited to pick out and bury chicken bones in a sand and plaster of paris mixture, but that didn’t compare to the fun we had chiseling them out of the rock. Together, the children carefully used tools to learn about one of the most important parts of being a paleontologist--digging and cleaning off fossils, of course!

...and that’s only the beginning!

It’s so exciting when a paleontologist finds a dinosaur fossil, but that’s only the start of the exploration. Once fossils are excavated, they need to be put together like a puzzle to learn about the dinosaur that’s been found. So that’s what our paleontologists did, too. As a team, we pieced together the skeletons of a miniature triceratops, apatosaurus, and stegosaurus.

Sizing Up These “Terrible Lizards”

Using an overhead projector, we took some pictures of dinosaurs and adjusted the sizes until the pictures matched the children’s guesses of these reptiles’ real-life proportions. Then we made the dinosaurs the actual sizes so we could compare our guesses to the real thing. It was so fun to see that the children were all taller than some fully grown dinosaurs, and it was amazing to look up at the face of a tyrannosaurus rex--on the ceiling of the gym!

Bringing It All Home

One of the most wonderful things about teaching is hearing from families how students bring classroom learning home. Lorelai's family says she's been talking a lot about what "extinct" means. Hudson told his parents that the trilobite went extinct before the dinosaurs even existed. Sami's mom was excited to hear him telling his family that dinosaurs weren't the first living things on Earth; rather, blue-green algae was. Wow! If you have stories of the learning your preschoolers are sharing with you, please let us know! 

Next up: Tracks

The children will learn how to identify creatures using their footprints. How? We’ll start with our very own “preschool creatures” making and matching their own tracks! Stay tuned...