it's a dinosaur day

Last week at preschool, the kids were supposed to talk about dinosaurs. They didn't. Preschool was canceled due to mass sickness and vacations. Lou and Bee were beyond disappointed. I quickly decided that we would just make it a dinosaur day at our house.


We made dinosaur tracks by painting on the feet of our toy dinosaurs and marching them across our papers.










Then we made fossils by pressing our small dinos into play dough. Bee also thought to make some with foot prints.

We made a bunch of molds, then poured in some plaster of paris. I really don't like working with this stuff since the box says it's a known cancer causer in the state of California. Good thing my state isn't so smart, so we used it, carefully.

It takes about 30-40 minutes to dry up nicely. I've done this with 2nd graders as well as 6th graders. It's funny how some projects have no age limits.

We carefully peeled off the play dough (about half was savable). When the play dough dries it will chip off a little better although the contrast of the color on white is nice too.

We even found some dinosaur pictures to color in this Diego coloring set that our favorite Aunt and Uncle (We only have one aunt and uncle combo... we do have outher lovely aunts) sent for Lou's birthday this week. I think this has made the whole 'dinosaurs were on Earth long before there were humans' thing kind of hard to explain, but it's Diego- so of course it makes sense.

We even found a few dino books on the shelf. I always did a super cool dinosaur unit with my students and have tons of stuff in storage. We will have to revisit dinosaurs when we are back in the same state as my teaching gear. My favorite dinosaur book is Dinorella, the dinosaur Cinderella, but I must have "misplaced" that awhile ago.... some times students take things.

Laurie Berkner has a fun song that the kids danced to at dance class. We cranked it up and did some dinosaur marching. Lou was pretty reluctant once the camera same out.