Dinosaur Fun!

Oh.  My.  Word.  Teaching about dinosaurs is probably my most favorite unit of all time.  I am not sure why, but I am guessing it is because my students are always so interested in dinosaurs and they crave any and all knowledge they gain about this majestic creatures.

The last two weeks before spring break were all things dino in my classroom.  My students were so eager to learn as much as they could and it just made my teacher heart full.

We did a couple of projects throughout the two weeks.

The first one was working with our reading buddies to research a dinosaur.  I gave each pair of students (one kindergarten student and one fourth grade student) an iPad, directions, and a recording sheet.  The buddies worked together to research information about their assigned dinosaur and fill it out on the recording sheet.

The best part of this project was the fourth graders.  They were getting so excited about searching for the information.  One particular student was practically bouncing when he realized he could revise his search and get more specific information.  Ah.  Maz.  Ing.

We ran out of time with our reading buddies so I had my students do the last part on their own.  We found an image of their dinosaur on their iPad and then had them draw and label it on the back of their research paper.

I was so impressed with their artistic abilities.  I have some real artists in my room.

We also made a {almost} life-sized stegosaurus.  We would have made a fully life-sized one, but I didn't have enough room in our hallways at the school.

We made our stegosaurus in pieces and then my fabulous para put the pieces together to put him on the wall.  Our class voted and decided to name him Sam the Stegosaurus.

We wrote an informational interactive writing doing shared research about our stegosaurus.

Another fun project we did was making our own fossils.  We made them out of salt dough one day.

Then I took them home, baked them, and brought them back.  Then we painted our fossils.

While we were learning about fossils, we decided to become paleontologists ourselves.  Although, we excavated chocolate chips out of cookies rather than dinosaur bones.  I don't think I have ever seen my students concentrate so hard on something.  I think you could have heard a pin drop in the classroom while they were working.

We learned how to draw our own stegosaurus and then labeled him because that is a non-fiction text feature we are learning about.

Here are some of our literacy centers we did:

Read and Write the Room - It is always a class favorite.

Dinosaur ROAR - You can read about how to play this game here.

We were working so hard that we needed a little dinosaur snack.

You can find all these activities and more in my new dinosaur unit.  

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Dino-Mite Dinosaurs

This week we will be learning all about dinosaurs.  I love teaching about dinosaurs because no matter what the make up of my class is.....they LOVE to learn about dinosaurs.  I don't know what it is, but all kids seem to be fascinated by dinosaurs.  My second ever TpT purchase was Deanna Jump's Dinosaur unit which you can find {here}.

One of the first ideas in here unit is a fun way to introduce dinosaurs to the students.  I put my own little twist on it this year.  She makes a paper mache egg that ends up "hatching" a dinosaur.  As I told you about in an earlier post, I create pysanky.  You can read about it {here}.  We have done this on ostrich eggs.  My mom orders them from an ostrich farm, but when she received them a couple had cracks so we couldn't use them for pysanky.  I asked her if I could have them for this idea in my classroom.  :)

Anyways, here is our egg.

I told the students I found it when I was taking my dog for a walk yesterday.  They were in awe.  We made this chart about what we thought would be in the egg. {This inferencing chart is also from Deanna Jump!}

They obviously didn't remember which animals were oviparous and which animals were mammals.  I had one boy just insist that a lion was in that egg....ha!  The egg already had a visible crack in it which made it so much more fun because the students kept seeing the crack and telling me how the egg was starting to hatch!

When the students went to lunch, I broke the egg in half {which isn't easy because ostrich eggs have a natural enamel on them so it was had to break}.  This is what they found when they came back to the room from lunch recess.

They were excited at first because the egg had hatched, but then some of them were disappointed because it wasn't a real animal.  Some of them truly believed that a real animal was going to hatch from that egg.  I guess that's what I get from using a real egg!  :)

We then made a dinosaur schema chart.  {Of course I forgot to snap a picture of it, but I am sure you can visualize it.}

We read the book "The Day the Dinosaurs Died" so that the students understood that the dinosaurs lived a long time ago and not when people lived.  This is always a hard concept for the students.  They usually think that cave men lived when there were dinosaurs.

At the end of the day, we do our math centers.  Today we used my new Dinosaur Math Centers.  The kiddos loved them.  I am so proud at how well they are doing with some of the harder concepts. {Click on the image to grab these math centers for yourself.}

This little sweetie is working on Dinosaur Counting On.  She grabbed a dinosaur, wrote down the number and then writes the next three numbers in sequence.

This little guy is working on Dinosaur Domino Adding.  He is writing the number of dinosaurs on each side of the domino and then the total number of dinosaurs on the dominoes.

Here we are working on different ways to make 10.  The students put some dinosaurs on each of the pictures and record their answers.  Here he had 4 dinosaurs on the tree and 6 dinosaurs on the volcano.

I decided to use this center as an assessment also.  This quarter we are assessing matching sets to 15 so this center was perfect for that.  This little guy is counting the dinosaurs on the cards and matching them to the correct number.  The other students at the center were doing this with a partner while I pulled one student a time to assess.

Our last math center for the week is one of our all time favorites.....roll & color.  This one is a dinosaur edition.  Students are rolling two dice, counting the dots, and color the number.  In the math centers, I have two other versions of this same game.

Tomorrow we will be using my new Dinosaur emergent reader in class.  It is a non-fiction book all about dinosaurs with some simple facts.  This will be a great introduction into some of the different dinosaurs before we dive deeper into our learning of dinosaurs.  {Click on the image to grab a copy for yourself.}

Later this week I am going to the IL Kindergarten conference.....I am super pumped to hear all the amazing presenters, but I am also a little bummed that I will be missing some of the dinosaur fun.  I have been having a hard time deciding what to have my sub do because there are certain things I want to do with my class.  Anyone else ever feel like this when you know you will be gone?

Lastly, my good friend Elizabeth is having a giveaway because she has hit 101 followers!  I am so happy for her.  Click on the image below to enter her giveaway.  She has 20 amazing prizes including my Math Surveys for the Year pack.

I am off to work on my sub plans that I keep pushing off.  I will probably be up half the night tomorrow working on them.  :)

Have a great week!  I plan on posting this weekend about the conference since I probably won't have a chance to post the rest of the week.

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