More Dinosaurs
This week the kids focused on their sticker workbooks, a great find from Target (see resources). These they could easily do on their own at ages 5 and 8! The 5 year old had a bit of trouble with some of the stickers, but otherwise it worked out fine. They do 4-6 pages a day and I think we will round out our lessons next week. Therefore, the book will have lasted 2 weeks. In essence, it’s a sticker book with some oft-repeated dino fact information about the different species. There are several favorites, along with fun items like mazes, copying the feature onto a grid (great challenge), and more dinosaurs, of course. I love that they can go at their own pace and don’t need me to read each item with them, the fun bubbles of words make it easy. Plus, stickers!
More Hatching
During Prime Week in July, we ordered half-price dino Animal Planet Hatch ‘Ems. Check out the photos below! Basically the anatomy is a shell of some dissolving material attached to half an Easter egg. Water melts the coating and voila, hatching. We did this on Monday and it took a few days for them to come completely out of the eggs, and they are still ‘growing’ into bigger dinosaurs. The take away is that dinosaurs hatch from eggs and hatching takes time. I’m glad we can do the fun activities at home that the kids wouldn’t do at school! I went back and read reviews and I think we’ll take them out and let them dry and shrink back down to let them play with them tomorrow instead of letting them continue to grow.
Even More Dinosaurs
I got some of the scratch-art dinosaurs from Melissa and Doug. Included in the order were some dinosaur magnets., and Xmas things! The 3 year old even took a turn with the stylus and had a good time. She also used a re-usable sticker item I found on clearance. The magnets were great for ‘what dinosaur am I,’ which the kids have had a great time with, again! We read, and read, and read, and still haven’t gotten to all the books I want to order for them. On the other hand, I can just keep ordering and they can read through the holiday! That’s what’s brilliant about home school, right? Add in watching The Good Dinosaur, powering through to finish the Discovery Dino Pack (2 discs, like 8 hours) and watching some short video clips and the kids had an exciting week!
Edited to add: Just for fun Friday morning, we put baking soda and vinegar in the sink drain to emulate a volcano (without hours of work)… and it cleaned the drain at the same time!
Resources
Topical Books on Dinos and fossils
Books the kids are reading on their own, see their GoodReads Lists: K-1st/ 2nd-3rd
Dinosaur Memory card game
Discovery Essential Dinosaur Pack (DVD set-available nearly everywhere, we got it from the library)
National Geographic Kids Dinos Sticker Activity Book (Target, on Amazon, as well)
The Good Dinosaur DVD from the library
Show-Harry and his Bucket of Dinosaurs from Netflix
Various short dinosaurs videos from Netflix
Melissa and Doug Dinosaur magnets
Melissa and Doug Scratch Art dinosaurs
Animal Planet Hatch ‘Ems
Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Home Schoolers for their Weekly Wrap up. Click HERE for info/to join!
Those hatch ’ems sound so neat!