DINOSAURS!!!

Yes last week we studied dinosaurs, much to the delight of our boys.  Maxwell, after having read many dinosaur books to him, looked up at me with wonder and said, "Mumma, are you saying that dinosaurs were actually REAL?!"  He knows dragons and fairies are not real, so this revelation was really exciting to him.  He kept talking about when they would be resurrected and how much fun that would be.

I had wanted to make footprints in clay and imprint them with plaster, and then I found the PERFECT book for this activity at our library.  It's called "Let's Go Dinosaur Tracking!" by Schlein and Duke.  It talks all about tracks made by dinosaurs and how we found them and what we learned from them.

The Imprinting worked pretty good, but the toes and fingers cracked really soon.  When I do this again, I will make the moulds deeper.

Our "dinosaur" tracks getting preserved....

Another great book I found was "Dinosaur: Digging Up a Giant" by McGowan and Broda.  Which explained how you find dinosaurs and put them together for a museum.  It was very simple and cute, and led into our next activity which was making a fossil that we will excavate next week.

We had our dinosaurs and bugs die and get stuck in "mud" that we made.  We then covered them with a layer of sand, another layer of mud, a layer of dinos, sand, and a layer of mud again, etc.  Our "mud" was one part water, one part vermiculite, and two parts plaster paris.  It worked really well, and we talked about what really happened to the dinosaurs as we did it.

Science actually happened this week, and even though I don't think I explained anything very well, I think the boys had fun and learned at least something.  We talked about matter and how all matter has mass and volume.  The funnest experiments were the ones proving that air was matter.  We tried to blow up a balloon in a bottle and then put a hole in the bottle and forced the balloon to stay blown up inside of it.  We also weighed air.  We made model molecules of solids, liquids, and gases as well as a few other experiments.

Preschool was awesome.  I was right about Hyrum; he needs one on one time.  Last week was horrible with his friend here, but this week he really excelled.  We talked about the letter "B" and sang "ba, ba, ba, buhhhhh" to Beethoven's music while "conducting" it with a ribbon-wand.

We sang songs, read books, and practiced letters.  It was really rewarding.

For our field trip we flew kites.  It was a PERFECT day to fly kites, and everyone, including Daniel, had tons of fun, I got a work out, and friends and cousins who saw us joined in the fun.

However, after dinner that night, Dustin convinced us to leave RIGHT THEN for our mini vacation that we have been planning for next week, and we had a much funner field trip the next day....

THE ROYAL TYRRELL DINOSAUR MUSEUM!!!

Apparently, Alberta is the capitol for the world when it comes to dinosaurs (very convenient for us :)

Drumheller, in the badlands of Alberta, has the world's largest dinosaur museum, the world's largest dinosaur statue, and is just plain cool to visit.

It was really neat that we had already talked about fossils, bones, prints, palaeontology, extinction etc BEFORE we went, so that everything we saw reinforced what we had already learned.  Fun fun!