Night At The Museum History Unit - Making Rexy

Our history unit continued today, turning from Theodore Roosevelt, to a big dinosaur skeleton. We recently had a dino day, so we're already familiar with the Tyrannosaurus Rex, but there's always room to learn a little more. Besides, dinosaurs are fun (to learn about anyway - we wouldn't really want to meet one).

Montana Kids has a great deal of information about the bones that have been found in Montana. We took a look at the map of dig, and museum locations. I can see we're definitely going to have to make a dinosaur road trip, once it finally stops snowing. I had a pretty good idea that all of the museum sites for children would present the dinosaurs from an evolutionary stand point, so we started out with another look at www.answersingenesis.org/kids/videos.

This time we watched The X-Nilo Show. It was funny, but factual, and it explained very nicely the differences in Biblical, and non-Biblical, scientific views. It was nice too, because it also explained how Biblical historians come to a timeline of about 6000 years for the age of the earth.

We looked at quite a few pictures of T-Rex skeletons from the various museums in the state, and compared them to Rexy. The movie makers did a pretty nice job. We were planning on watching the special features to check out the scale they used (Rexy doesn't look quite big enough), but we got busy building our own T-Rex out of Zoobs, and lost track of the time.

We'll probably continue moving through the other characters from the film, while finishing up some of our dinosaur activities. I printed out a T-Rex mural for the kids to color from http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/ , that will probably take them the better part of a week or two to complete (it's five feet tall!). I'd also like to return to Teddy Roosevelt, and review some of his better known quotes. I'm thinking that has handwriting practice written all over it.

I had thought we'd take on one character from the movie per day, but now I'm thinking we'll introduce a character each day, and then mesh them together a bit as we move on. That will flow nicely with the feel of the movie anyway. Of course, in the end, I hope to separate them all out into their proper places on the timeline. We did manage to complete the marking of another thousand years today, and discovered another math bonus of making a timeline - now we have a really good understanding of how big a thousand is.

It's great to be a homeschooler!