Dinosaurs for Kids

Part of William and Catherine's DINOSAUR DISCOVERY

• You don't have to be a homeschool family to enjoy Dinosaur Discovery. This is a family activity. If you have a weekend or evening to spare just get out a large piece of colored card, gather the children together and get going.

• Each of you contribute whatever your age or ability. Our children are age 11 and 13 but it is equally suitable for anyone aged from about 7 right through High School and then on up to my husband's age (which is older than me!).

• Dinosaur Discovery can take as long or as short as you like. We've been going for 3 months now and don't expect to reach the present day for some time yet - but you could just try it out for a day and see what comes out. I just fetched a piece of sponge from the bathroom and stuck it down; the inquisitive faces soon appeared!

Rob's water color © Diagram Visual Information Ltd 1983

FIRST pick your PERIOD

(Cambrian, Jurassic, Cretaceous or whatever catches the eye). Naturally enough, we started at the beginning 4,500 million years ago but you could start anywhere. The idea is to bend the project or Unit Study to whatever talents each of you has; my two children love drawing dinosaurs so that was easy. My husband got caught up in water color dioramas which he could put at the top of each Period showing the plants and animals that had evolved. I like craft things so I got the children to hunt out the colors of card, felt, holographic and tissue paper that I should use.

Lots of stuff! © Sonya Chappell

• Lichen (Pre-Cambrian).


• Sponge (Cambrian). Sadly I found we had some real sponge but the bathroom sort would do.


• Ginko leaf (Triassic). We used a laminated one.


• Feathers (Jurassic). We sellotaped down artificial ones because they had pretty colors!


• Coal (Carboniferous).


• Piece of Magnolia tree (Cretaceous).


• Chalk (Cretaceous).

Catherine's picture of a Duncleosteus eating a Stethacanthus © Catherine Chappell

• Paper foldouts to show how a specific aspect of anatomy evolved over time (e.g. wings).


• Tabs: Catherine had great fun with the fish-type animal pictured above which you could pull out from the open jaws of an approaching larger predator. They certainly liked the danger aspect!


• Pipe cleaners: Sticking a bent-over pipe cleaner on the back of card is an easy way to make dinosaurs jump out.

Eotyrannus © Todd Marshall

Loads of exciting pictures to download - just use Google.

• National Geographic has a brilliant timeline, cover all the Periods and has useful facts:
  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC



• PBS has a lot of interactive activities around Darwin, survival and evolution. My two enjoyed watching the asteroid hit as part of the 'Why did dinosaurs die out?' debate and looking at the "All in the Family" guessing game on:
  PBS



• Click on the database here to give you a Dinobase where you can type in the dinosaur species you're interested in. If you click search you'll get facts, vital statistics, classification and an illustration of your chum:
  DINOBASE



• Wikipedia is useful for looking up specific dinosaurs and prehistoric animals to find out when they lived and has information on the Periods too, though William and Catherine tended to find the writing a bit dry:
  WIKIPEDIA

Meganeura, a deadly dragonfly from the Carboniferous period, © Sonya Chappell

Now's the time to get crafty. Those eagle-sized dragonflies were too tempting for me. I chose acetate for the wings and used gel pen to mark on the wing patterns. Catherine chose blue card for the body with holographic eyes.
If you want to know exactly where I got the idea from, it's based on pages 34-35 of BBC Books: The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life (see above).

Mother Oviraptor feeding her babies with two Velociraptors fighting © Catherine Chappell (age 9)

If your children love drawing, this is the place for them. Whatever the result, they can't go wrong! So long as it comes out looking vaguely big and colorful it'll look great when it's stuck down. And this is the place for your drawings too! If you're being held back by that old chestnut telling you that you can't draw, just pretend yours is done by the children! I'm sure they won't mind. It's also worth remembering that no-one really knows precisely what dinosaurs looked like so you can't go too far wrong. Maybe someone will discover in future years that the colors you've chosen are exactly right! If you do get out a pencil it's amazing how much more you see and once you start looking you'll find you can't stop.

William's drawing of a Edaphosaurus, a spectacular Permian herbivore © William Chappell (age 11)

Although this is a herbivore, experience has shown that the images most likely to inspire my two tend to be around the themes of killing, biting and fighting! Absolutely no reflection on William and Catherine, of course...Anyhow you should find plenty in the books recommended here to encourage the creative side.

Part of Dinosaur Discovery © Sonya Chappell

By now you should be getting the idea but there's lots more to come. Here are a few things which do not rely on you being quite so creative or imaginative:

• NEWSPAPER / MAGAZINE ARTICLES

Printed articles give your project a different look and there are plenty to choose from. Newspapers often cover the latest fossil finds. National Geographic has many good articles on dinosaurs and evolution. I get my two to choose whatever they are interested in; they picked out a fascinating article on the recent discovery of a penguin the size of a man.

• COLORING SHEETS / FACT SHEETS / PRINT-OUTS

My two aren't so into coloring sheets but Enchanted Learning has lots you can download for free. It also has free dinosaur print-outs, fact sheets and plenty of other teaching resources.

Map of the World in the Triassic period 251-199.6 million years ago © Ron Blakey, NAU Geology

You could use Wikipedia to print off some beautiful maps showing how the worlds' continents have changed over time. Catherine chose this one because she thought you'd like to see what the world looked like in the time of the dinosaurs.
All you do is go to Wikipedia and type in the Period you're interested in:

• Go back to the Permian and see all the continents joined together as Pangea:
  www.wikipedia.Permian


• Or look at the amazingly different Cambrian:
  www.wikipedia.Cambrian


• Or the 430 million year old Silurian:
  www.wikipedia.Silurian

Part of Dinosaur Discovery © Sonya Chappell

• If you look at the scene above you'll see the dinosaurs are disappearing down a crack in the Earth. I used shiny red foil to swallow up the tail of a dinosaur to mark the Cretaceous extinction and the end of the dinosaurs.

• Here's another scrapbooking idea which comes in handy - tracing paper. It can give another 'feel' to animals - we used colored pencils on top for a rather transparent trilobite.


• Early plants look good cut out of felt.

Ammonite: Scaphites. sp. © Todd Marshall

One way of bringing Dinosaur Discovery to life is to make a plaster cast mold of a fossil and stick it on your card. We made a plaster cast Trilobite at our local Museum and painted it at home. It was easy and fun to do. Since then I've found out you can buy molds of fossils very cheaply and make a cast with plaster of Paris. Apparently they can even be filled with chocolate and food - though how that would stick down I'm not sure!

PLASTIC MOLDS FOR AMMONITE, DINOSAUR CLAW AND TRILOBITE

If you have a real fossil at home, you could make a cast of it using modeling clay and plaster of Paris. The idea is to put your fossil in modeling clay and fill the indent with plaster of Paris. I haven't tried this myself but I'm going to have a go.

HOW TO MAKE A CAST OF YOUR OWN FOSSIL

Dimetrodon in desert landscape © William Chappell

You don't have to make your Dinosaur Discovery hard work! Here are some places your children can have some fun:

• The Baryonyx mystery and Big Al
  There are lots of dinosaur games here. William's favorites are these two; you have to try life as a young Allosaurus and weigh up the evidence to uncover the truth about Baryonyx.


• Dinosaur Brain Teaser


• Dinosaur jokes. You have to click on the 'Table of Contents' in the Zoom Dinosaur list and then go to 'J' in the index which takes you to the jokes.

Head of T-Wrecks © William Chappell with help from Catherine Chappell

Making dinosaur robots from junk has kept us absorbed since William got Stephen Munzer's book as a present from his Aunt on his fifth Birthday. The idea is simple - you just collect old house cleaner bottles, plastic jar lids, pop-up bottle-tops, air fresheners, coat hangers etc and turn them into ready-made robot components. I have to say the first time I saw this book I was pretty horrified; I am not good at DIY and the idea of making one of these models seemed way beyond my skills! But William perservered and studied this book every day over Breakfast until finally he nagged me into helping him. The amazing thing is that you really can make first-class model dinosaurs! The essential skills are melting, cutting, gluing and spraying with probably the most common task being heating a bradawl in a candle flame to pierce holes in wheels and bottles so you can stick barbecue stick axles through them. The book is aimed at age 8+; at age 11 William is now OK to tackle most things and, as part of our Dinosaur Discovery, he finished Ballistasaurus, who catapults marbles from a coat hanger tail. Generally though I have been around to help, largely because of the danger aspect - I always had the horrible premonition of the heated craft knife slipping onto little fingers. But I was quickly impressed at how rapidly both William and Catherine became competent in simple tasks like using a junior hacksaw to saw one arm off a coat hanger and I noticed how marvellous a project it was - it really opens your mind to the possibilities of household junk. It's also quite fun because you'll find that soon you're asking all your friends and acquaintainces for all their cast-offs too - which can be quite a conversation-starter!

You can see more of T-Wrecks and his friends on my new website at:
www.homeschool-activities.com

Watch out here he is! © William Chappell with help from Catherine Chappell

This was the first dinosaur robot we attempted. Can you spot what he's made from? This is the parts list:

• 8 plastic forks


• 1 plastic coat hanger


• 1 wedge-shaped air freshener


• 1 trigger-action spray bottle


• 2 plastic wall plugs


• 2 circular air fresheners


• 2 metal bolts or screws


• 1 plastic drinking straw


• 3 wooden barbecue skewers

All the instructions are in the book. Piercing holes in plastic bottles is dead easy and the barbecue sticks act as axles with the ingenious idea of using short lengths of plastic straw as spacers between the air freshener wheel and the body. Plastic forks are easy to attach as arms and you can snip off the fork heads to make rows of vicious teeth by warming the forks in a glass of warm water before you snip off the handles.

Terror-Saw © William Chappell with help from Catherine Chappell

Terror-saw was another success. A bit of plastic bin bag worked great as the leathery wings, which are attached with a girl's hair gripper. His head is a clothes-peg with one arm cut off. Here is the parts list so you can see he's not that hard to bring to life:

• 1 plastic clothes-peg


• 1 pop-up drink bottle cap


• 3 CDs


• 1 hair gripper


• 1 hollow plastic coat hanger


• 1 childsize plastic coat hanger


• 1 plastic carrier bag


• 2 film cannisters

Rajasaurus narmadensis © Todd Marshall

The Show has had lots of good reviews - try and catch it if it passes near you!

Fossil ammonite found by William on our local beach © Sonya Chappell

Now, I'm not saying you and your children will necessarily dig up your own dinosaur; but what about going on a fossil hunt? There's nothing quite so amazing as splitting open a boring piece of rock and finding your own quartz-filled ammonite. Our Dinosaur Discovery really opened up our minds to the idea of just how ancient the Earth is and how many creatures have lived here before us. A local Geology book is a real help to find the right areas to look; and if there's nowhere near you you could always plan a fossil hunting holiday. Rob and I went on a trip to the States shortly after we met and one of the highlights was visiting Dinosaur National Monument in California. Falling in love obviously isn't an essential part of fossil collecting but having children is a real help. In my opinion children actually make much better fossil hunters than their parents; maybe it's something to do with being closer to the ground.

A plaster cast we made of a dinosaur footprint from some of the earliest dinosaurs in the world © Sonya Chappell

Amazingly, it turned out that it just so happens we live near one of the best sites for dinosaur tracks left from the Triassic Period. The most perfect ones are in the local Museum but there are still some exposed on the tideline. So we took some plaster of Paris down and made this cast. It's not great but you can just make out the three toes of a meat-eating dinosaur which walked on its hind legs. Catherine and William are going to paint the cast to make it more obvious but isn't it exciting to think that a dinosaur once walked down the beach near us? If you could find out if there are any dinosaur sites near you it would really bring your project to life.

The Dinosaur Discoverers: William and Catherine © Sonya Chappell

That's it! Have fun. As you can see, Dinosaur Discovery is a whole family thing - I certainly got as much (if not more) from it than the children! They contributed loads but they also learnt a lot just by watching. You can even involve your relatives and friends - we had to ask round until we found someone with a Magnolia tree in their garden. I'm hoping we've done enough to tempt you to follow in our footsteps and have a go at your own Dinosaur Discovery.

And if you'd like more ideas about other projects to try, here is a great website full of homeschool ideas run by Julie. Without her encouragement, I would never have thought of sharing this with you.

HOMESCHOOLING IDEAS

Finally, thanks to William and Catherine for choosing the pictures and helping me.

Rob's picture of Boxgrove Man © John Sibbick courtesy of National Geographic Magazine

DEMOLITION
I thank the amoeba for
My stomach juice's wonderful flow
The fish for my backbone;
The frog for lungs;
And all animals together
For my strong skeleton;
Last, the tree-foot apes
And all simians
For my lobed brain
And instrumental thumbs.

And I report to them,
That we, their heirs,
May, with our bomb,
Destroy the fruit of millions of years,
Our children;
Ourselves, as well, of course,
And, incidentally, all of them.

© Norman Iles When the Warm Times Come

My Dad was the poet Norman Iles and I've chosen this one because it's one of my favorites. If you feel encouraged to do anything around the Dinosaur Discovery project then perhaps we'll have helped show our children what makes this Planet such an amazing place to treasure.

Gigantosaurus © George Thomas

George (age 6) has drawn this wonderful Gigantosaurus; isn't it great? He really does look huge George and the volcanos in the background are really colorful. Thank you for giving it to me so I can show everyone else what a lovely drawing you've made.

© Sandy KB

© Sandy KB