Theme Time: Dinosaurs

Two weeks ago, I read The Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark to ED.  This inspired a short themed unit on dinosaurs. Here are a few of the things we did, plus other dinosaur books and dinosaur puzzles that I don't have pictured below.

Last week we were lucky enough to top our theme-time unit off with a visit to the Gray Fossil Site in east Tennessee on our trek to visit Auntie C, Uncle T and the cousins for Thanksgiving at their farm.

Upper - Lower Case Letter Matching from Making Learning Fun.

Time for a scavenger hunt!! I hid dinosaur themed letters all throughout the basement.  ED found the letters and had to find the matching partner (pictured below). I often go to communication4all, Early Learning tab or sparklebox for letters with a certain theme.

The other kids came running and demanded their own scavenger hunts! DD had to find cards and find the card pairs that added up to 12.  LD had division problems and their answers to find and pair up. (Below)

 

General dinosaur play, of course!!

Triceratops Leaf Counting -- from Making Learning Fun

Sight Word Letter Tile Cards from Making Learning Fun. The tiles are from our spelling program -- All About Spelling. We love, love, love that curriculum for DD (6) and LD (8).

Dinosaur Counting Cards from 2 Teaching Mommies.

Dinosaur Egg Counting Cards from Making Learning Fun.

LD pulled out some of his fossils and did some reading.  He found this amazing brachiopod fossil in Grams and Gramps' neighborhood in Missouri.

On our way to Nashville, we happened upon this museum at Gray's Fossil Site. It is about a half-hour off of I-81 (along I-26).  When they were building I-26 construction workers noticed some fossils. It turned out to be a fossil bed rich with fossils from about 4 1/2 to 5 million years ago. It is an active fossil site and has a wonderful interactive museum.

They have lots of displays  like this saber toothed tiger.

They had so many interactive activities and please-touch areas. Here the kids are trying to figure out what types of bones these are.

Uncover the fossils (with paint brushes and your hands).

Bone-puzzles

The kids spent lots of time at this activity, hunting through a tray of pebbles looking for shark teeth specimen.

The kids were impressed by this triceratops.

You might be interested in our 60 page Dinosaur Packet with activities for 3-7 year olds.

Save the Egg Penguin Game -- and -- Antarctic Animal Game

DD enjoyed this penguin computer game.  The object was to move your penguin around to keep the egg warm by avoiding the other penguins and obstacles or predators that might get in your way.  Here's the link:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/marchofthepenguins/game/

Also at the national geographic website was a crittercam game. She had to spot the various animals of Antarctica -- the Emperor Penguin, krill, skua and other things.  http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/03/crittercam/antarctica/ 

Finally, she played a continent game.  The game flashes a continent. You copy it. Then it adds a second -- you copy those two. Then three, etc.  http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/games/geographygames/copycat/

Arctic Animal Science Journal , Penguin Unit and other Freebies

If you are working on Arctic Animals, this first grade teacher made a very cute science journal which incorporates polar bears, penguins, walruses, the arctic fox and snowy owl: Oceans of First Grade Fun. (The link no longer works.)
She also has a set of penguin "What Comes Between" math cards. The child has to place the number that comes in between 31 __ 33 or 36 __ 38.  What's nice for us is that they are in a penguin theme and are perfect for DD. We'll stick this activity into her penguin lapbook.

Another really cute unit is this Penguin Unit (No longer available) for tots and preschoolers. Although I found it clicking around in 4Shared, I managed to find the original blog posting here and download link from  MooMooTutu's blog (No longer available) and also see that is linked from Frogs Bees Under the Seas. (No longer available) Thank you for sharing such cute work!!

If you're looking for winter-themed activities to download for your tot or preschooler here are some links.I loved the snowman unit shared by Musings of Me. (No longer available) Wow! I'm so thankful for all fabulous work others have shared.

Update! I'm so sorry to say that many of the links and resources that I originally shared in this post are no longer available. 

If you are interested, I created a Winter Packet a year or so ago. You can find out more at this post. ~Liesl, homeschoolden.com

 

Click here to find out more about our  Winter Packet.

You might also be interested in the cute resources that go along with The Mitten, a wonderful book about animals in the winter by Jan Brett.

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter. You might also want to check out some of our resources pages above (such as our Science, Language Arts, or History Units Resource Pages) which have links to dozens of posts.  You might want to join our free Homeschool Den Chat Facebook group.  Don’t forget to check out Our Store as well.

 

Happy Homeschooling! ~Liesl

Penguin Unit

It's taken a while to sort through my pictures to show what we have been doing with our penguin unit.  Most of the activities were for ED, though there were a few sprinkled in for DD and LD as you'll see. DD has been working diligently on a penguin/Antarctica lapbook.  We'll share pictures of that soon.

So here's the first cute activity. I took bottle cap letters from Confessions of a Homeschooler and glued them to the bottom of these cute ornaments from the craft store.  I printed out a few penguin letter sheets from Communication4all

I set them up on the table in the mornings, but then need to put them back in her workbox or the penguins go walking!

Along those same lines, I printed out the penguin numbers from communication4all and had ED feed the penguin the number of fishes it wants.  Then ED gets to help eat them. You can also find penguin numbers at Making Learning Fun.

ED just loves do-a-dot pages right now. This is from Making Learning Fun.  You could have your child cover the circles with pennies or magnets instead.

This lacing card is from Activity Village

Penguin hat color matching -- from homeschoolshare.com

stickers from oriental trading

a wooden penguin mask on sale for 50cents at Joann Fabrics

We read a number of penguin related books together.  The girls LOVED Cuddly Dudley.  We've read it at least 15 times if not more, often twice in a row!

The Emperor's Egg is a non-fiction type book explaining how the male penguin cares for the egg. This was a wonderful book and led right into our penguin-care activity below!

The kids tried to walk with an egg on their feet (you have to look closely at the picture. It doesn't show up very well.)  LD was able to do it for a very short distance, but once he put it on his tummy, he raced around the room!

 

We had to watch some of this amazing film -- March of the Penguins! The kids were sad when the egg rolled onto the ice and the film showed the egg freezing and cracking.

As I mentioned, DD has been working very hard on her penguin/Antarctica lapbook. We'll share more about that soon.

Snippets of our Week (for our 2 1/2 yr old)

I've had a hard time getting to the computer this week (more about that in another posting). I have about four posts I've been working on--Snippets of ED's week, LD's week and my week, not to mention posting pictures of DD's completed butterfly lapbook. But now these are rather looonnnggg because it's taken so long to get these posted. So, in reality these are snippets of the past two weeks or so!

First I'd like to share these really cute physical activity cards we've added into our day!

I added these to ED's workbox about two weeks ago and we just love them!  They are balance, dance and gymnastics movement cards and when ED is at loose ends (because I'm focusing too much attention on the other two) these cards are a wonderful break!  We have a stack of about fifty cards and do a half-dozen of the movements suggested. They include things like star jumps, making yourself wide, thin, pointy, jumping around, moving in a zig-zag and more.  At some point I hope to add in some yoga pose cards that I downloaded for free as well, but haven't had a chance to print them out. Click here to go to the free downloads of the physical education cards from sparklebox. There are three sets that I printed out there.

ED in her balance pose!

These past couple of weeks I've brought out some of the girls' toys for ED to play with in our schoolroom.  Along with the play food, I made a little oven out of a box using aluminium foil and black circles covered with contact paper (on the top) and white paper glued straight on the box for the front area.  ED and DD loved this! (We don't have a play kitchen.)

ED has taken great pride in "doing her math."  She's been doing these spider sheets every day for about 10 days now. I cut the sheets apart after taking these pictures, but as you can see she's just tonging the correct number of spiders onto each page (I have to help her identify the number and to count them out).

ED and DD have really enjoyed bingo markers lately.  They do pages and pages at a time. These pages came from Making Learning Fun.

These do-a-dot letters are from http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/

ED and DD loved, loved the spider web activity (with glue and glitter).  They did about twenty!

"I want to do nastics again!"  ED goes once a week for a gymnastics class and wakes up each day hopeful that today is the day! The other kids go to this same gym, but in the evenings when it's considerably more crowded!

I made this felt board last year out paint canvases.  Here are the links showing how I made it:
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-felt-board.html
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/making-felt-board.html
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/felt-board-play.html

My sister sent us these paint cards years ago.  We pulled them out for ED to sort through. 

It had been a while since I set out pin pushing.  I just make designs on construction paper and let the girls go at it. They usually go through about 10-15 each!  This time they are using a push pin, though I often have them use a meat skewer wrapped with a couple of rubber bands.

 I showed the picture above of the food/kitchen play I set out one week. This week I set out the farm animals and have been doing farm-themed things with ED.

I forget where I got this cute shadow matching activity. I lost one of the pages, but that makes it more challenging as there are a couple left over animals.

This sheet is from kidssoup. It's simple one-to-one correspondence where ED had to give each crow a popcorn seed.

Here ED is matching the farm animals with the (free) farm animal cards I printed out. They also have some wild animal cards as well.

Farm Animal Sounds:  This game called Old MacDonald Had a Farm is a great gave for memory and animal sound recognition.  Under each of the hay stacks is an animal baby that needs to find its mama.  On the player's turn she/he chooses a mama animal, pushes it down on the red stand and listens to the sound it makes. Then she/he chooses a hay stack and tries to see if the baby animal is hidden under the hay stack (see the picture below).

We haven't played this yet, but I found cute farm animal bingo sets here:
 http://www.animaljr.com/farm-animal-bingo-printable-bingo-cards/