Little Scientists take on dinosaurs! This was one of my favorite Little Scientists sessions of the year. As usual, we started with a story (Dinosaur Bones by Bob Barner) and then broke out into stations. Here's what we were up to:
We used our math cubes to measure how tall or long pictures of dinosaurs were and then assigned some superlatives like shortest or longest.
I like using tangrams when I can- they're great for practicing fine motor skills and visual discrimination.
We also worked on estimating skills by guessing how many people could fit inside a triceratops footprint and how many steps it would take to walk from a triceratops nose to tail. (I found the printable footprint here)
We practiced our field work with shovels and then brushes to find different types of dinosaur toys.
I usually have a one-t-one correspondence activity, since it is such an important skill for future math & science success. This one matched dinosaurs with a digit to eggs with a number of dots.
Visual discrimination is also an important skill for scientists and puzzles are a great way to practice that. Each puzzle only having 2 pieces makes it easier for toddlers and preschoolers.
Having a physical activity seemed like a good idea for when the weather is so yucky. Moving around like dinosaurs fit our theme and got some energy out! I used a prize wheel from our summer reading club and added tasks like "roar like an ankylosaur" and "jump like a triceratops".
Our take-home experiment today was making your own fossils. Each scientist got air dry clay, two dinosaur figurines, and instructions on how to make their own fossils. I made sure everyone got two different figurines so the scientists could observe the differences between the fossils they made.
