Thursday, September 2, 2010

Dinosaur Body Structure Activity -- Marshmellows, Straws and Skewers

We came across a wonderful idea here to learn more about body structure and how dinosaurs had to be perfectly balanced to stand and move.  I read the paragraphs about the importance of balance and had the kids balance a ruler on their fingers and then add a light head and a heavy head (the heavy head made the ruler tip over and you can see the "head" falling off.  They roared at that!!)
From there we went on to do the marshmellow activity.  Of course, anything involving something so yummy is sure to be a hit, but believe it or not, they really learned a lot about how difficult it was to balance the head with the body.  And we all worked together to build a T-Rex... the kids understand how truly important the dinosaur tail was in achieving balance.




This is DD's Marshmellow Dinosaur
Here is LD's dinosaur
And in the end we were able to make a T-Rex of sorts!!

4 comments:

  1. Really cool works!! I especially like the T-Rex. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great idea! My son will love this!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh ys great idea! We've used these for geodesic designs but never thought to creat other structures from them as well!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Love this idea! My dino-loving son would gobble this up - literally. ;)

    ReplyDelete