I am currently teaching a Dinosaurs for Preschool class to a small group of children in my homeschool group. You can read all the posts here.
After missing 2 weeks due to heavy snow (I know! Is this Texas?), we were back on track and talked about dinosaur bones.
I started by reading this really fun glow-in-the-dark book about dinosaur bones. It has regular pictures of dinosaur scenes, but in the dark their bones glow! The kids LOVED it!
So I explained that the only way we know about dinosaurs is by the bones that are dug up. The scientists that do this are called PA-LE-ON-TOL-O-GISTS. Say "paleontologists." They had many different versions of this word!
We talked about how sometimes a whole dinosaur skeleton may be found, and other times just parts of it are discovered.
Then . . . drum roll please . . . we had our own dinosaur dig!
Here's what I did ahead of time:
I purchased a package of toy dinosaurs (I couldn't, for the life of me, find a bunch of toy dinosaur skeletons). I placed each one in a paper cup.
Using plaster I purchased at the craft store, I filled each cup with the plaster and almost completely covered each dinosaur.
After the plaster dried, I peeled the paper cups away and got this:
Then, I gave each child one, along with a plastic fork, and told them to DIG! They were so excited! It turned out that a plastic fork was not quite strong enough. We finally decided that banging the plaster on concrete was the best method. Not quite like a real dino-dig, but they got the idea.
Nicholas shows his partially-uncovered dinosaur. 
Trevor, my friend Tiffany's son, shows what he's accomplished so far.
Nicholas shows his partially-uncovered dinosaur. 
Trevor, my friend Tiffany's son, shows what he's accomplished so far.
After all 11 kids successfully uncovered their dinosaurs, we went back inside to do our own dinosaur skeleton art:
Using a simple dinosaur coloring page and some wooden shapes and popsicle sticks (and liberal amounts of liquid glue!), the kids glued a skeleton on their dinosaurs.
It was a very busy class, but I think the dig was a success!
Get more fun preschool ideas here. Visit my updated Prairie Sense blog for a look at a different period in history.
