Our dinosaur unit

So a little while ago I was looking for a short art activity at the end of the day and thought of paper bag puppets- this is the one I made off a pic I found on google images. It made me think of the fun I had in art class when I was little. Sam spends an hour or two a day coloring, painting, etc., but we hadn't tried any crafts or anything.

Then when we were shopping I found some plastic dinosaurs and also dinosaur gummies and I thought that I'd like to get them for Sam but am tired of just giving him stuff. So I thought we could do a treasure hunt for them (we did our first treasure hunt two weeks ago because of a book we read). The more I thought about it though, the more I liked the idea of doing a dinosaur themed week. Science, art, crafts, songs, videos and books about dinosaurs with a treasure hunt at the end of our unit. So that's what we did and I liked it so much that I'm thinking of doing other units this year (I'm thinking music will be one- we'll make instruments, etc).

So for our dino unit we learned stuff like:
-dinosaurs lived long ago and are all gone now
-dinos were born in eggs like birds
-we learned special things about a few dinosaurs (iguanadon's tooth is like an iguana's, t-rex's footprints were a foot and a half long but only of its tiptoes, there was a dino that stole other dinosaur eggs)
-I learned that there is no such thing as a brontasaurus- they put the wrong head on that dino's body when the discovered it :-)

And then we made this art:

a shape-a-saurus

Dinosaur silhouettes
we made salt dough together (kind of like playdough), then made fossils, then baked them... we were going to paint them and then do a dig in our sandbox- but our sandbox is having issues (rain getting in it, cats using it to poop so we need to deal with all that before we can play in it).
We made a stain-glassed dino which was a neat technique- when my nieces were visiting they made stain-glass hearts and I really liked this craft the best (it's contact paper with construction paper outline and tissue paper put on any way they like in the middle...
here's a close up

We also learned and practiced the dino pokey (you put your claws in, you put your claws out... and scratch them all about, etc)

And we watched the dinosaur song on Youtube every day. We also watched some other assorted things about dinos on Youtube

Oh and we made a volcano. We watched volcano videos on Youtube, explained what they are and what they do, then we mixed vinegar and red food coloring together and built a little volcano mountain around a cup filled with baking soda using our leftover saltdough. In went the vinegar and out came bubbling lava! Sam was thrilled and used all my baking soda and vinegar- I figured the dollar investment was worth it.

So we finished up our unit with the treasure hunt (each clue was in an easter egg (dino egg) with a baby gummy dino and the next clue). It was fun!

When my nieces were here we did oobleck again- that's the one where you mix cornstarch and water and it's a solid when you apply pressure and a liquid when you don't. My 6 year old niece loved it and played with it for a long time. Sam liked it both times too- but played with it for less time :-)

I think if I do do these units that I'll post what we do on here :-) I'm interested in something I read about art on a blog- that teacher-inspired, child-changed art is neat for kids to do. You teach them a technique or something, but then they do what they like with it. I think there are benefits both to that idea, to complete undirected art time and to more conformist crafts and I want to be exposing Sam to as much as I can.