Danny and the Dinosaur Unit

I’m a day late getting this up.  If you’re here today looking for 10 Ways to Pamper yourself, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.  It’s only Tuesday, and I fell like it’s been THAT WEEK, just for all I have to do to get ready for upcoming events this week, and all I didn’t get done, and the emotional mess I’ve put myself through. But, I got this writing lesson up, and now I usher you off to read Danny and the Dinosaur unit.

Hi! Future Ticia 2023, it’s 10 years later, and I don’t know what the theme was for this particular project that caused me to create a Danny and the Dinosaur unit, after all I could have used this really cool free dinosaur lapbook, but no I had to go and design a unit. Okay, I couldn’t have used the cool lapbook because I didn’t know about it.

Back to past Ticia, though I have to admit I’m pretty much writing this post from scratch again.

Danny and the Dinosaur unit supplies

Why didn’t past Ticia organize this so it’s useful? Really Ticia, you should have known better.

Danny and the Dinosaur (obviously), printable (join my newsletter to go find it on the subscriber page), pasta shells, macaroni noodles, penne pasta, butterfly pasta, a sand box (we went to a nearby park)

Pre-knowledge of dinosaurs

Before we read Danny and the Dinosaur I wanted to know what the kids already knew, especially since we were studying land animals and our science book has chapters on dinosaurs.

So we started a KWL chart, and then we read the text on dinosaurs, and then we headed to the park for a dinosaur dig.

Putting together the dinosaur dig

I had the kids play on the playground while I buried the “bones” (pasta) under the sand in a 2 foot by 2 foot square. Then I called them back to start digging.

Each kid had approximately 15 bones.  As they dug up the bones they had to document where they found each bone, and when they were done they drew what they thought the dinosaur looked like.  In the end, they drew or wrote what they thought happened to the dinosaur.

Each of the dig sites was set up slightly differently.  One was set up with the bones scattered all over, another with the bones arranged like it died while sleeping, and another so it looked like the dinosaur was attacking something.  Or that’s what it looked like in my head.

While they didn’t do great writing down where things were discovered, they did do a great job of attempting to reconstruct what happened, which was fun to see

Reading Danny and the Dinosaur

Then we got home and read Danny and the Dinosaur, which has Danny meeting a dinosaur at the museum after seeing a dinosaur skeleton (or that’s Future Ticia 2023’s memories of this book). After reading the book they went through and answered the questions and then wrote their own day spent with a dinosaur.

Okay, Future Ticia 2023 pretty much wrote this entire thing all over again because I just didn’t write a lot about our Danny and the Dinosaur Unit. That is what happens when you’re having a bad week as you’re trying to write something you said you would share with lots of people.