The dinosaurs are becoming extinct around here

Every good unit study probably starts out with a trip to the library, right?! I was sick the week before we started this, so I sent my hubby to the library. He was convinced I had left an empty shelf somewhere with all the dinosaur books I put on hold. But by getting a variety of fiction and non-fiction books, I was able to teach Marshall about the 2 genres. Whenever we read one of these books, I have him tell me if it's fiction or non-fiction. It's great for him to be able to distinguish between real fact books and made-up stories.

{I know of at least 3 more in the bedroom that I don't dare go get for fear of waking somebody up.}

Marshall asked for more dino stuff to do every single day. Until today that is. I think we're all dinoed out. Which is good, it means he learned all there was to learn and now it's boring so we'll move on to the next thing...just as soon as I figure out exactly what that is. I have ideas a-plenty, so we'll see what we land on.

But first, I wanted to give dino-credit where dino-credit is due:

The bulk of our lapbook pieces came from Homeschool Share which has awesome lapbooks for FREE!! I chose to not use the creationist pieces for this lapbook and supplemented the space in the lapbook with other fun things I found online. Unless otherwise noted, all pieces came from Homeschool Share.

Marshall's artwork adorns the cover. The directions to draw the T-Rex (which turned into an "Everything Dinosaur") came from Rob Court's book "How to Draw Dinosaurs" that I found at our local library. While the 6-step directions included more like 12 steps, I liked the format of this book and Marshall didn't seem to mind it. I would say it's more for 8 and up though.

As you open up the lapbook, we have the sequence card set on the flap. He put them in order but got a little confused on the numbering. The cards came from Making Learning Fun. In the middle is the dinosaur height graph and the dinosaur shape count (Making Learning Fun). I printed 3 of these and stapled them onto a colored background. On the next flap we have the Paleontologist and Dinosaur matchbooks in which Marshall defined each word for me and I wrote his definition down.

Turn the page and we have 2 more matchbooks, Extinction and Favorite Fact. On the next full page there are 3 dinosaur adjective pieces (template at Homeschool Share). We read "Thesaurus Rex" then talked about adjectives, synonyms, and what a thesaurus is. Then I asked him to give me 3 adjectives that describe dinosaurs and I wrote these on the templates. Then next project was to find the continents certain types of dinosaur skeletons have been found on. In an effort make more educational for Marshall, not just "glue this here and that there," I decided to show him how to do research using table of contents in "DK Great Dinosaur Atlas" and "The Usborne World Atlas of Dinosaurs" to get the answers. As it turns out several of the continent/dinosaur match-ups that the lapbook creator had together were not correct. Being the perfectionist I am, I decided to just rearrange the pieces for our mini-book. The final flap includes game cards for Memory that Marshall colored and enjoyed playing with. We did a variation of Go Fish he insisted be called Go Dinosaur as well as standard memory. We also have our reptile book that compares dinosaurs to today's reptiles.


The crafts we have done so far include:
Paleontologist toilet paper tube puppet

Ptronodon toilet paper tube puppet
Brachiosaurus rainbow shape
Stegosaurus rainbow shape

(all from Making Learning Fun)

Ptronodon toilet paper tube puppet
{in his favorite color - pink}

The "rainbow shape" Dinosaurs

The clothespin cards from Making Learning Fun were also a huge hit, although a bit too easy for him:

And on the back, another Marshall-drawn dinosaur.

Along with lapbook pieces from Homeschool Share, and fun activities from Making Learning Fun, we also used worksheets from Learning Page, though you'll have to become a member (it's free). I may put in a third file folder and use over-sized brads to attach the worksheets so I can keep everything from the unit together.

To wrap it all up, we're taking Marshall to a Dinosaur Exhibit at a local science museum. It's only around for another month or so and I figured this would be perfect timing to go check it out!! I can't wait to surprise him Saturday morning :D