Dinosaurs Part 1

This is the 1st week of our book club. I decided Dinosaurs needed to be broken into 2 weeks. Sadly, my camera died during these weeks, so there are few pictures available...sorry, it gets better in later weeks, I promise!!

I've included the links where I could. My notes are in italics.

Dinosaur Outline

Explain book club, create cover for binders
I provided each child with a binder. They can leave or bring.

1. How did students like the book? Favorite Parts.

2. Read Scholastic First Discovery Dinosaur Book


3. Discuss what students know about dinosaurs.

4. Who Am I worksheet
Answers are on the Random House Lesson Plan Page. You can turn it into a game, cut out each segment, go around, have each student read a section, etc

5. Discussion of Living vs Non Living

6. Classification
4 main criteria for being LIVING
* Contains DNA
* Energy-conversion of to sustain life and growth
* Sensing & Responding to Change (receptors)
* Reproduce (either alone or together)
I started to lose my little guys here. My class ranges from age 5-12. Would you believe I had actually planned to start some light Classifications with them? Here's a cool taxonomy worksheet.

7. Chart some living and some non-living things
Because I was losing them, we didn't do this section.

8. Compare Dinosaurs to modern day reptiles

9. How are dinosaurs born?
By egg. This went into a discussion of pregnant mommies,etc..

10. Life Cycle of Dinosaur
New members of a group are born (hatched); they grow to mature creatures; they mate and have babies; then they get old and die. Repeat
A life cycle is like a pattern.

11. Dino Jokes
I found many such jokes online. Printed out the ones I thought they'd "get" the most, and cut them out. They all took turns reading a batch. This went over GREAT! I had printed out SO many and we used them all. SO corny, but so much fun!

12. Triceratops Craft
Don't bother with the toothpicks. They are too hard for regular glue to hold on. They came out cute though.

13. Measure a Dinosaur
50 feet of string; Children hypothesize as to the size of dinosaurs. They measure 50 feet on a sidewalk with the string; Compare to strings their size.
This was kinda a downer. Very slow..didn't get much out of it. But it got us outside, so we improvised and came up with the game below!

14. Dino Tag (T-Rexs & Baby Dinos = Sharks & Minnows)
This has become the game they want to play every week! 1 person is "it"....in this case the TRex, and everyone else is a Baby Dinosaur, on the other side of the street. I say GO and TRex has to go catch babies. Then we re-assemble with those captured who are NOW TRexes themselves, to eventually capture all of the babies. Once everyone is caught, a new TRex gets chosen.


My previous posts on this subject are:
Forming a Co-op
Magic Tree House Index