January 3, 2018

Today we talked about dinosaurs! Each boy created their own dinosaur, with different characteristics and a unique name. Each boy chose to have a meat-eater dinosaur, probably because that's more exciting for an eight-year-old boy. After deciding on the characteristics, the boys got to create them with play-dough.

Parley's dinosaur: it has two heads

Blake's dinosaur: it had several horns on it's head

I didn't get a picture of Will's dinosaur, but his is the one I actually remember a name for. He had a red dinosaur and called it a Utesasaurus.

After making dinosaurs, we played around with casts and molds. Our best objects for these were leaves and sweedish fish. It was exciting to see all the impressions from different aspects of these objects: the lines from the leaves, the spots on the fish. I think the boys could have done this for much longer than we provided, especially because they wanted additional objects to imprint.

Next, we talked about fossils, and Brock showed the boys some fossils from his rock collection

He has a dinosaur bone:

  He has a shark tooth:

 He has a fossilized fish:

To finish the night, each boy got to create a layer symbolizing different eras the dinosaurs lived. They put some toy dinosaurs in each layer as well as fish. We used pudding and colored each layer differently. Afterwards, they each had some of the pudding to eat, but it didn't take long before they were done with that!

Tonight, it seemed like dinosaurs were a hit for our 8-year-old boys. We will continue more of this in two weeks, since pack meeting is next week.

Requirements completed: Digging in the Past #2, #3a, and #4