D is for Dinosaur!

"Big and small, God made them all."

Dionosuars!  How could this unit not be fun!  When we started this unit I was a little worried about how I would explain creation vs evolution to a 5 year old and I had a slight panic moment.  However, my worries were completely unfounded since it never occurs to Liberty that there is any other way for creatures to exist if God did not create them!  Since this was not an issue, I decided to avoid evolution all together.  Instead of using an encyclopedia or other mainstream science resource to study the different dinosaurs I bought a book called Dinosaurs by Design by Duane Gish.  It is SO good and there are a ton of dinosaur picutures and descriptions.  We also read What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? by Jon Morris and Ken Ham.  This book focuses primarily on The Flood and creation research rather than information on individual dinosaurs.  It is also very good.

We also took a field trip to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman.  I had never been but I knew they had dinosaur exhibit.  I was really impressed.  For such a small museum, it was really well done.  The exibit included a giant Apatosaurus, the largest Pentaceratops skull on record, and a Saurophaganax.  Liberty loved it.

Saurophagonax

Apatosaurus (this picture doesn't do justice to its actual size)

Pentaceratops (Guiness Record holder for the largest dino skull ever found)

There is also a hands-on area of the museum that includes a dinosaurs dig.  Unlike the dinosaur digs that Liberty has done in the past where bones are basically thrown into a sandbox, these bones were buried in a mixture of sand and wax to create a more realistic excavation site.  This was Liberty's favorite part although she gave up pretty quickly!

Liberty digging for dinosaurs

For fun I baked the girls dinosaurs and letter D shaped cookies.  A few months ago I bought a collection of 101 cookie cutters at Wal-mart for $10!  I was really excited to get them out.  Liberty also used them with her playdoh.

There is a great dinosaur lapbook at homeschool share as well.  We added a small flip book of dinosaurs from our trip to the museum.  I also wanted Liberty to get some extra handwriting practice so I created a fun dino handwriting worksheet.

I felt like we were super busy with this unit, but it was so much fun!