Saturday, April 25, 2009

Dinosaur Day - A Christian Approach


Between Earth Day, Arbor Day, our wind unit, and solar unit, we've danced around the issue of fossils fuels quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. Maybe that's why today felt like a good day to discuss dinosaurs. Or maybe we were just ready for some fun.

We started off by watching the Jurassic Ark Mystery series at www.answersingenesis.org/kids/videos . This series lays the evidence of the dinosaurs and Bible side by side to dispel some of the myths of modern "science". It's a little advanced for the preschool set, but has lots of good corny fun for middle schoolers. We followed it up by reading the account of the behemoth and leviathan found in Job chapters 40 and 41.

Next we made coffee ground fossils, an activity we found at www.crafts.kaboose.com/fossil.html . It's just a basic flour and salt dough with coffee grounds and coffee mixed in to give it a muddy rock type look. We pressed shells into our dough, though any variety of items would make a good imprint for a "fossil".

Then we move on to story time with Whatever happened to the dinosaurs? by Bernard Most. We listened to Raffi's, "If I Had a Dinosaur", and colored dinosaur coloring and handwriting pages printed from www.homeschoolshare.com/dinosaurs.php, where you can find a number of really great dinosaur themed resources.

We made a dinosaur dig snack. Layering chocolate graham crackers mixed with whipped cream, dinosaur fruit snacks, and chocolate pudding in dessert dishes. These were a little messy to make, but a lot of fun to eat.

Finally, we expanded some of those little sponge-in-a-pill dinosaurs, that I found at the grocery store, and called it a day.

It's great to be a homeschooler!

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