For a while I knew I wanted to do a dinosaur room transformation in my classroom. A dinosaur room transformation was on my mind because almost all little boys love dinosaurs and this would time in nicely to our unit on animals. Also, a dinosaur room transformation would be just the thing for my own little guy who was one of my students this year. He has had a passion for dinosaurs since he was a little bitty guy and even at one point said he was going to be a dinosaur when he grew up so....I say, Bring on the dinosaur room transformation! I gathered information from the amazing Hope King!
The day before our dinosaur room transformation, I could hardly wait to surprise my seconds with one of these little boxes. I did not let them see these boxes until the end of the day and when they left to go home, I handed them out with instructions to not peek or open the box until they left school for the day. Right away, the buy-in and engagement were high. I could hardly contain myself because I also wanted to see how they responded when they opened the boxes, but that would have ruined the surprise and I would have been peppered with even more questions than before.
Inside the box was this little note along with an egg and a dinosaur. The note told them that tomorrow they were going to become paleontologists and learn about dinosaurs of the past. I also asked them to return the box the next day, although a few of my littles never did return these, it's O.K. I packed the little boxes that were returned away for another round another year. The eggs and dinosaurs that were included helped me to split the class into groups the following day by color. I picked the dinosaurs up at the Target dollar spot and the eggs came from Dollar Tree. I create the boxes from popsicle sticks and stamped the word "Danger" on the outside. Those took a long time to create and that is why I decided to keep them to use another year. I tied those little boxes up with a piece of red yarn and called it good.
I tried to make the learning environment come alive by creating a darkened room (I covered the windows). I placed dinosaurs around the room and put these eggs in a nest, which was actually a wreath. I had dinosaur sounds playing on the computer as well to add that sensory detail and make it more believable.
I quickly pushed some of the desks together to create jungle jeeps for teams of three. To create the jeeps, I took a black plastic table cloth and covered the table and glued strips of tinfoil to make the grill and then added pie pans for the headlights. I taped a pool noodle with a sign to each jeep. The sign showed a dinosaur name for their group as well as a color.
Our first activity was that each group was given a bucket of dinosaur eggs. They were to open each egg and inside the group found strips with the names of different states. The strips told students where dinosaurs have been found. They had to find the states and color them on their maps of the U.S. It was interesting for them to see all the different places that bones from these giant creatures have been found. We did find that no bones had been discovered in our home state.
Inside the giant eggs that were in the nest, were puzzles. We learned that paleontologists have to put together bones like a giant puzzle. Sometimes they have all the pieces and sometimes they do not.
Another activity we did was this dinosaur poop activity. We found out that scientists can examine poop to discover more about an animal. Examining poop will help scientist find out what an animal ate. Students had to dig though the poop to find different pictures hidden inside. Each picture had a type of food that dinosaurs ate on it. They had to take the food and sort it into whether the dinosaur would have been an herbivore or a carnivore.
To make the dinosaur poop, I mixed up a cake mix but did not cook it. I added some random things like Cheerios and seeds to make it a bit chunky. I provided a bucket of water so the students could wash off the cards they found for the sort. The cards were laminated so they would not be ruined. This was one of my favorite activities because the students were completely grossed out and yet loved it so much. Next time, I would do this outside cause this made a huge mess in our classroom.
Students pretended to be paleontologists and searched the room for different pieces of bones that would go together to create a dinosaur. Once they found the pieces, they built a dinosaur skeleton.
These are some of the dinosaurs that were scattered around our room. I had some helpers create some dinosaur footprints on the brown paper as well.
Throughout the day we had a warning horn that would blare. Once it blared, students had to stop everything and take care of an emergency situation that arose. Before they could go on with their task, as a team they had to solve a math challenge. Once they came up with the correct answer, they were able to continue on with their regular task.
At the end of the day, each student received a dinosaur excavation kit. It had a plastic dinosaur and a block to dig through to find the bones to the dinosaur they had. We had such a fun day of learning!
