Diggin' for Dinosaurs!

Today is our first *unofficial* day homeschooling.  I say unofficial because Jagger is not yet 5 years old and it is not technically the beginning of his kindergarten year.  However, we are just r-e-a-d-y!  We have been home a lot because of the cold winter (in Texas, anything below 70* is cold) and have become bored, bored, bored.  So, I've decided to put together some unit studies and just have some fun reading and doing crafts.

I am off-the-charts excited.

I decided to start with dinosaurs.  Check out this post to see our game plan for the next two weeks.

We started the day off checking 1,037 dinosaur books out from the library.  When we got home, we read Digging Up Dinosaurs by Aliki (guess this person is the Cher or Madonna of the literary world).  We learned lots of new words like paleontologist, geologist, and carnivore.

Afterward, Jagger dug through sand in a pan to find dinosaur bones (craft sticks, toothpicks, macaroni, and tongue depressors).  

He LOVED this activity.

After he got all the "bones" out, he snuck some back in so he could keep playing in the sand.

Once I finally got him away from the sand, we laid the bones out on a piece of construction paper to form the body of a T-Rex.  I had to give him a few hints ("maybe the macaroni can be the tail"), but aside from that, he was able to make it on his own.  He laid the bones down and I glued them to the paper.

When I signed his name at the bottom, he made me add "the Discoverer" to his name.  :)

While I made lunch, I gave him a couple of worksheets so that he could practice writing the word "dinosaur."  I also gave him a coloring page/fact sheet on the T-Rex.  Did you know the T-Rex had teeth that were up to 6 inches long?

What an incredible first day of (not official) school!