During the month of May I get to break out some super fun Units. For the last few years I have done a Dinosaur Unit. After seeing Deanna Jump in a kindergarten conference I was sold! That was the beginning of Dinosaur days.
I started the dinosaur unit by sneaking this huge "dinosaur" egg into my classroom.
Normally I paper mache a big Bop balloon but this year I was pressed for time. I took a huge Bop balloon from the dollar tree and covered it with athletic tape. (It took about 3 rolls). Then I painted it and voila' you have a dinosaur egg.
Once my students notice the egg, that is where the fun begins!
I tell them a story about how my dogs were barking like crazy this morning when I let them out. I tried and tried to get them to come in but they wouldn't come inside. Finally I went outside and I saw this huge egg! I decided to bring it to school because I didn't want to leave it at home - just in case it hatched while I was gone!
We then made a huge anchor chart guessing what could be in the egg?
It is great to hear their ideas and reasonings.
You can find this activity and many more from Deanna Jumps Dinosaur Unit.
Once we finished our anchor chart we completed the what's in the egg page. We made our own prediction and then made a guess. After we completed our first guess I then told my students a little more information about the egg.
(Was it heavy or light, how it felt, rough or smooth, soft or hard, you get the idea)
Then we checked our prediction and made changes if we needed to.
The next day when the students arrived the egg had disappeared and inside the basket were 2 huge plastic dinosaurs. My students we so excited!
In the past, I have cut the egg open and had the dinosaurs hatching out but that would have been difficult since I used a balloon and athletic tape! :)
But the bonus is that I still have the egg for next year...maybe if it doesn't deflate!?!?!?
My dinosaur unit lasts for one week. The egg activity is what gets it started.
The next thing that we do is learn about Paleontologists.
I create an anchor chart with Paleontologist Pete.
We then read a book about Paleontologists. I found this great book from Kindergarten Smorgasbord.
Click on the link below to check it out!
After we read the book we added all of the tools that a paleontologist uses to our anchor chart.
Each day of the study I picked a specific dinosaur to study, read a book, and then did an anchor chart.
This year I added a new craft. We read the book If the Dinosaurs came back and then made our own version. These turned out so cute!
If you haven't read the book you should! It is a great little read aloud!
Here are a few pictures from the book.
After reading the book my kiddos came up with their own versions.
On the day that we studied the T Rex we did a lot of visual learning. As I teach units throughout the year I like to paint a picture for my students.
We were talking about how tall a T rex was (40 feet) and I told them that it was like 8 Mrs. Gardner's (wow...they all said). At that moment I realized that I could take this a step further and give them a better visual.
We went out into the hallway and measured how tall a T Rex was. I had my amazing assistant stand at one end of the hallway and we measured out 40 feet. I then had my kindergarteners line up hand in hand to show how tall a T Rex was!
Now that is one big DINO!!!
She may be hard to see but my assistant is all the way at the end of the line!
After we got a visual on how tall a T Rex was we then decided to check out a T Rex foot!
I showed my students the T Rex foot and then we predicted how many kindergarten feet would fit inside of a T Rex foot. We made lots of predictions and then we had to figure out how we could find out our answer.
Some of the ideas:
We could all stand in the foot.
We could lay down and put our feet in.
We could put our shoes in.
That is what we did..we took turns putting one shoe in at a time until we filled the T Rex foot!
It ended up taking 41 Kindergarten shoes to fill one T Rex foot.
I also had a very cool Dinosaur book that had fold out pages that showed life size dino parts.
One of the pictures was a T Rex mouth (4 full pages)
We took our T Rex height discovery, T Rex Foot size, and the T Rex mouth and put it all together to visualize how huge a T Rex really was!
We also read a Who Would Win book.
If you have not ever read one of these books they are AMAZING. The author takes two animals, insects, or dinosaurs, and has them square off in a real life battle. My students love these.
Here is a link to check out the Who Would Win books on Amazon!
Deanna Jump also has a paper that goes along with these books!
(Yet another great idea I got from her at a conference!)
Here is the link to her page:
Before I start the book we make a class graph.
We draw on a post it who we think would win and place it on our graph.
We then do the printable from Deanna Jump and then I read then boo.
My students are definitely engaged as we discover Who would win.
To finish this unit we became Paleontologists and dug for fossils!
We used Chocolate Chip cookies and were digging for chocolate chips!
We used toothpicks for our tools.
My students loved this activity.
Overall Dinosaur week was a success!
Thanks to all the AMAZING teachers out there who share with us their wonderful ideas to help make our classrooms lots of fun!
Stay tuned to see how I end the Year with a week long camping unit!
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