Slice of Success - Dinosaur Day

Many of you followed along with my lamentations over Dino Day preparations.

I pinned and pinned ideas. I sorted the ideas, and couldn't settle into a plan. I bought little plastic dinosaurs to embed into excavation eggs, then decided it was too much work... then went back and did it anyway.

I'm sure what you are all dying to know is the answer to one, lingering question.

"Was it worth all the work, Maria?"

I'm happy to report that the answer is an unqualified....

"The boys loved it."


Here's what I ended up with as my stations.


1) Excavation Station

This is where all those little "dinosaur poop" bundles landed. The boys got to excavate a dino egg, and then they had to locate the information page about their dinosaur (See the papers at the top of the image?). They got to keep the little dino and their paper. I even had one boy, who usually has trouble staying excited about tasks, come up to me after and ask if there were any extra eggs.

(I gave two to his mother, and then gave the extra eggs to a mom who helped run another station who is also a third grade teacher.)

http://www.projectsforpreschoolers.com/make-your-own-dinosaur-eggs-fun-preschool-craft/

I used the tiny dinosaurs from Oriental Trading (you can buy them in sets of 96) and it took me about 4 double batches with the recipe from that link to make them all.


2) Take Flight
I knew excavating wouldn't take the boys that long, and then they would get rammy. So I partnered that activity up with information about Pterosaurs and making their own little gliders. My 6th grade son ran this station all by himself, and did a great job.

Forgive the lousy photo quality! I was running
from station to station trying to keep it all moving.

3) Feeding Frenzy
The next station was a simple bean bag toss game borrowed from my father-in-law. I "dinofied" it by making the teams have the goal of feeding dinosaurs. The poster on the wall shows progressively larger dinosaurs. As teams got bags in the hole, their dino marker moved on up the wall. The person in charge kept track of how many total brachiosaurs each team was able to feed.












4) Relay Race
There's no photo for this one, since I wasn't able to snap a shot without serious blur (and clear boy faces of kids other than my own children). I bought paper masks that included what I decided were:
T. Rex
Iguanodon
Pterosaur
Triceratops
I created movements for each of those dinosaurs, and the boys took turns being each dinosaur during the race. This was a great way to burn some of their extra energy!


5) Pin the metatarsal on the velociraptor.
My younger son insisted I should have just made it "pin the tail", but that's not NEARLY as much fun to say five times fast, right? Thankfully, this was the station that the third grade teacher helped run. She made sure each boy learned what a metatarsal is, and how to pronounce it.

I did invest in having this poster laminated, so that it would last. I used an online poster creator called "Block Posters" to split up an image into large chunks to be printed.






That's it... a full hour of dinosaur fun. A little bit of learning, a little bit of mess, and a bunch of movement. Whew!

I’m participating in a writing community at Two Writing Teachers. We write about a little "slice of our life" each Tuesday. In March - we attempt to write a slice EVERY day! Head over to their blog for the link up.

If you stop by and have written your own slice, please leave the link in the comments so I can easily find your post!