Thursday, August 23, 2012

Thinking Thursdays: Digging for dinos


Hello!  Here are some excavation activities we did to explore more about dinosaurs... We dug for bones in the sand using brushes (I've uploaded the printable here, all you need to do is to print, cut and bury in sand. You may want to laminate them for durability!  Oh, and if you would like other skeletons, the illustrations were obtained from this site):


Junior J had great fun digging for the "bones".  Then he had to sort out the two sets of bones (something that wasn't easy to do, and he required some guidance), and then assemble them into skeletons, which we displayed in his natural history museum.  It was a great activity for introducing how difficult it is for the paleontologists to sort out the fossils and figure out which bones belong to which organism, and he also got to learn terms like "rib cage" and "vertebrae" along the way.


Since he had so much fun, I gave him a dino egg the next day (this was a gift from his godmother).  Those were the ones you could put in water and that generates loads of fizzing, and you get a dinosaur at the end of it.  Pretty fun!  His happened to be a T-Rex, which I kidnapped that night and froze in a milk carton:


Then he was given a spoon, a syringe, and cups of coloured water (I coloured them using food colouring), and some salt (got the idea from this post).  We sprinkled salt over the ice block to create all the crevasses and tunnels, and then he got to work with squirting coloured water all over to melt the ice and rescue T-Rex.  He needed some help at first from Ah Kong (who's staying with us for the week), as the syringe was a little tight:


But he got the hang of it pretty quickly:


It took more than an hour of work, chipping away with the spoon, squirting coloured water all over, to get T-Rex out!  And after he was done, the remaining iceberg made for some fun sensory play... great for a hot summer's day!

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