And...Dinosaurs Come to an End

After graphing, charting, coloring, handwriting, tracing, fossilizing and researching, we think that we're done with dinosaurs for now. (Though we do have a field trip planned in a couple of weeks when Dad is off!)

What was our favorite part?

Ryan said, "The 'fartosaurus' - the new name we call Willie and all of the rest of it."

OK, I'd call that a success! (Little does he know that we also threw in some math and geography during the whole thing...YAY!)

Fossilized!

One thing we promised the kids was to make our own fossils while we were learning about dinosaurs. So we finally picked up some clay and Plaster of Paris to "dig" in to our project!

First, we rolled out our clay and decided which objects we would make into fossils. We found some cute little plastic dino's, a cool piece of wood, and some shells we've collected at the beach and pressed them into the clay. Ryan decided to make footprints too, so we ALL had to have footprints in our clay.

After that was the messy part...we spread some oil on the clay and then covered it with the Plaster of Paris.

Tick tock...while we waited the 30 minutes (an eternity for the kids) the dino's got a bath...

 

Peeling away the clay

 

Oooohhhh.... Ahhhhhhh....

 Ta Da! The final fossil molds. We thought they turned out pretty cool!

Graphing Dino's

HOW BIG IS THAT DINOSAUR?

Can you see two kids about 90 feet away? That's how big the Apatosaurus was (known as the Brontosaurus to us older folks!) We broke out the chalk and the tape measure.

What did we learn?

The Velociraptor is the same size as Dad.

Both Megan and Ryan are taller than the Leptoceratops.

All the other dino's were BIG!

Megan the photographer

Ryan's Dino

Dinosaur Madness!

We're all about dinosaurs at our house right now. Ryan is becoming quite the fact "rememberer" - just ask and he'll tell you about the latest one, how tall or long it was, what it ate, and more.

So far, we've learned about Brachiosaurus, Letoceratops, and Oviraptor...

Just a few pictures of the things we've done so far...next up is graphing how big they REALLY were! Yep, we'll be stopping traffic for this one!