As we ended the main school year, and headed into summer session this year, my daughter requested that we study “dinosaur science”. Now we have finished up our unit, and we had a great time learning about dinosaurs, and the kids both learned a lot! I wanted to share what we did, in case any of you have a dinosaur-interested kid, too.
We split our subject into 2 parts: dinosaurs, and fossils, so I’ll be splitting this post into two corresponding parts. We did dinosaurs first, during the first half of summer, and fossils after that.
dinosaurs
To kickstart our studies, we went to Dinosaur Island at Thanksgiving Point, which was an exciting way to start things. I have an entire post about our visit there, which you can check out here. It was fun to get to walk around an ‘experience’ dinosaurs in a real-world environment.
As a hands-on activity, I bought a Tectonic Brachiosaurus Kit. It was a bit fiddly to put together, but is a cool little model that shows how that dinosaur might have moved.
For our main method of learning, I got two printable dinosaur units off Etsy. The first one was about different dinosaurs, which was a nice way to familiarize ourselves a handful of them. Terms like “herbivore” and “carnivore” were introduced, as well. There were several little activities for the kids to learn the dinosaurs names, and to categorize them. It also included lots of coloring pages, but the best part was the dinosaur journal that we got to put together ourselves.
We also read The Colorful World of Dinosaurs by Matt Sewell––which is a lovely book––going through a few pages each week. In this first printable unit, there was a list of lots of different, useful books to read and learn more about dinosaurs. I have a tendency to want to do ALL THE THINGS, but with it being summer, and having my 3 year old alongside us, I kept it simple, and that really was the right call for us. But I appreciate the booklist, and may reference it later.
Even after we moved on to learning about fossils, we kept reading the pages from The Colorful World of Dinosaurs, and filling out the dinosaur journal every time we learned about one that matched up with one from the first unit.
fossils
Halfway through the summer, when we finished up the first unit, we moved on to one about fossils. The printable unit I got for this part had more actives that worked for a wider range of children (very young to maybe 7), which was nice for my 3 year old.
To help switch gears, we went to the BYU Paleontology Museum, which was was more interesting than I remembered. The museum had a lot of see, but was also the perfect size for younger children.
As a hands on activity, we did the Kiwi Crate Paleontologist Starter Kit. We learned about being a paleontologist, and the kids—and myself—both had fun with all the activities. Digging for the fossil was probably the fan-favourite, but making dinosaurs casts was also cool.
After learning about different types of fossils, and finishing up the Dinosaur Journal, we ended our studies with a trip to the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life. We went with some of our best friends, which was enjoyable, though the kids were a bit more interested in running around together than learning. Still, it was fun that were were able to spend time in two different museums to support our studies.
And that was our foray into “dinosaur science”. We really enjoyed everything we utilized, so I’d recommend any of those things. As child, I wasn’t really that ‘into’ dinosaurs, so I feel like I learned a lot, too. If you’ve got little ones wanting to learn more about dinosaurs, I hope this helps give you some ideas and direction!
