Poppins Book Nook- Dinosaur Fun!

I am so excited to be a part of the Poppins Book Nook!  This is our first month joining in the fun.  Each month a different theme is picked and then everyone picks a book that relates to the theme and then creates some activities to go along with the book.

We picked “Dinosaurs Before Dark” by Mary Pope Osborne for our book.  Hailey has just recently started reading chapter books, so she has been really excited that she can read these books on her own.  If you haven’t read this book before- it’s a series about a brother and sister, Jack and Annie.  This is the first book in the series where Jack and Annie discover a tree house.  There are lots of books in the tree house and when Jack is looking at one about dinosaurs he wishes that he could see a real pteranodon.  Suddenly Jack and Annie end up in the days of dinosaurs and of course, an adventure begins.  I love the Magic Tree House series- they are fun, fictional stories but with lots of opportunities for learning about history added in.

We decided to make a dinosaur diorama for our project:

A shoebox just wasn’t going to cut it for our plans 🙂 so we used a regular box instead.  Hailey got to work painting her box.

She added lots of different props.

Some dinosaur eggs

A volcano

She put a stream and a little pond in, painted some grass on, added some cotton clouds, put some sand and trees in.  And of course, the dinosaurs.

Hailey’s completed diorama- she did a great job!

We also made a paper mache dinosaur:

First the dinosaur was formed using aluminum foil.  There is newspaper stuffed inside his head and body to help keep its shape.

The dinosaur all covered in paper mache.
For paper mache, we use a 2:1 ratio of water to flour, and I added a little white glue to the mixture too.  It takes a couple of days to be completely dry.

Once the dinosaur was dry it was time to paint him.  We did a little research about the color of dinosaurs- some scientists believe that dinosaurs were gray, dark green, brown, etc. so that they could blend in with their surroundings.  Other scientists believe that dinosaurs were colorful and even had pretty, bright spots in order to attract a mate.  Hailey decided she agrees with the scientists who think the dinosaurs were colorful, so she painted him purple.

She added some pink and blue spots.

The completed paper mache dinosaur.

We learned a lot about volcanos too.  I cut out some dinosaur footprints and wrote some volcano related vocabulary words on them (lava, eruption, magma, crust, mantle, outer core, inner core, pumice, tuff, and pahoehoe).  Hailey wrote the definitions on the backs of the footprints.

Then she spread them around the living room.  I made some noises and Hailey and Hunter danced around on the footprints.

When I stopped making the noise, Hailey read the definition of the word.  The goal, of course, being that once we play it enough she will remember the definitions.

We did a bunch of fun activities all about dinosaurs so it was really hard to pick what to share!  So, here are some of the other activities we did last week too:

  Hailey made some dinosaur bones.

She created a dinosaur fossil.

One of her favorite activities was setting off a volcano she made.

She made this pretty dinosaur oil pastel painting.

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