We finished our dinosaur unit today. The kids had lots of fun with it, but we are all ready to move on. The remainder of what we did is:

• Finished reading Jurassic Park
• Read The Lost World
• Read Magic School Bus Chapter Book #9, Dinosaur Detectives
• Discussed map skills and followed coordinates to map out a path
• Discussed how body temperature varies throughout the day and took our temperatures each hour for 6 hours and then graphed the results
• Played Dino-Mite card game (many times!)
• Tried to predict where a drop of water dripped on the back of the hand would go
• Discussed largeness of prehistoric animals and insects
• Discussed differences between herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore teeth and determined humans are omnivores
• Built four wooden dinosaur skeletons (brachiosaurus, T. Rex, stegosaurus, and triceratops)
• Identified model dinosaurs using Dinosaur Dictionary
• Used the projector to enlarge and trace dinosaur models
• Assembled Dinosaur Museum
• Cameron copied an entry in the Dinosaur Dictionary (this was totally Cameron’s idea and not assigned)
• Ani used information from Dinosaur Detectives to write a short report on T. Rex (this was totally Ani’s idea and not assigned)
• Ani used information in the Dinosaur Dictionary to write a short report on Maiasaura (also Ani’s idea and not assigned)
• Assembled dinosaur notebooks from all the papers they have worked on through the dinosaur unit

We are planning to begin reading the kids’ Dinotopia series tomorrow. The kids liked the Dinotopia TV mini-series (they saw that a few years ago) so I think they’ll enjoy the books as well.