Dinosaur Days

This year I have some friends in my classroom that LOVE dinosaurs. I have never really had a group that loves something this much. Every squiggle, creative writing, and reading choice somehow turned into a dinosaur theme. I of course saw Hope and Wade King’s Jurassic World, and my inspiration came from this unit they did at the Ron Clark Academy. That led me to create my Dinosaur Room Transformation!

Hope will tell you that her room transformations didn’t start this grand, and that she started somewhere too. I wholeheartedly believe that even the smallest “room transformation” makes a huge difference. First, I used this planning page. You can find it for free here. I planned out what standards I wanted to review with my students, and what I would need to make it happen. I had two full days and one half day to plan activities for.

I also got these amazing dinosaur claw dig excavation kits for each student. They were worth EVERY penny. The kids were shrieking with joy! You could do this is pairs or groups to save money. Don’t forget that Oriental Trading has a wishlist feature that parents choose from! Just to make sure we were officially learning something from our standards, they had to describe the experience using adjectives. 🙂

These books are also from Oriental Trading company. You can find some of the books on amazon too. They are awesome and had sons of examples of text features. The students worked in groups with sticky notes to identify the text features they found.

While the students were working throughout the week, I had them write the names of the dinosaurs and pin them in the bulletin board.

I’ve used these stamps before from Oriental Trading, and the kids love them. They drew 2-D shapes and stamped the corners of each one.

We also searched for the faces of 3-D shapes in dinosaur poop. What kid doesn’t want to dig in dino poop?!?! This was my favorite idea from Hope and Wade King. This is what I used to make the dinosaur poop. I put it all in the pan and had it ready. I added the laminated shapes and then added the water before the kids came in that day.

 I used three shapes, so I copied the shapes onto three different colors of card stock.  I laminated them so that the poop wouldn’t completely destroy them. They did hold up throughout the lesson, but I wouldn’t use them again! They had to record the attributes of each shape and draw the faces of the shape. You can see they used their head lamps to see what they were finding! I got those from the Dollar Tree, and just bought head bands from the dollar tree and hot glued them together.

Lastly, I told them they were making a dinosaur cage for two plastic dinosaurs. They had 20 popsicle sticks, 10 pipe cleaners, and one can of play-dough to create a cage for the dinosaurs. This was an awesome way to wrap up our two days of dinosaur fun!