Last week, we did a mini dinosaur unit study at the request of six year old Natalee. She's very interested in dinosaurs and how they fit into the Bible so I decided we had just as well dive in. I was SO beyond thankful to find a perfect biblically based dinosaur lapbook for FREE on the internet, complete with lesson plans that I could just print off and basically go forward and use.
FREE LESSON PLANS/LAPBOOK: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/dinosaurs.php
{Click the green button that says "Click here to download the PDF," let it download and print!}
I did not print off the report pages or coloring pages but what great additional resources!
I also loved that there was a book list on the website so I knew what I needed. I looked through the lesson plans in anticipation of teaching the unit and quickly saw that the book What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? by Ken Ham and John Morris was used in detail daily. Our library didn't have it and neither did a couple of friends I checked with so I snagged it on Amazon for $4-$5. I say it twice in my video review, but I'll say it again - if you are going to use THIS lapbook do yourself a favor as a parent/teacher and buy the book. So worth it! It's simply also a great and well written resource for a biblical approach to teaching dinosaurs.
I had a couple of the other additional reading books in my home library already and had two other great biblically based reference books to use (seen in the video blog) so I felt like we were ready to rock - and rock we did. You do NOT need all of the additional books it lists so don't let the list intimidate you. If you want to narrow it down, of all the ones listed I wish I'd had: If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most and Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones by Byron Barton. However I didn't have them and we did just fine.
I'd love to tell you I followed the lesson plans to a t - and I did for the most part regarding the lapbook components and the teaching...however if I'd followed them completely my children would have gotten to make a paper mache dinosaur egg and sadly, they did not. Le sigh. They didn't know they didn't get to do it (see how that works?) so they had a wonderful time with the unit! Paper mache intimidates me - perhaps another week.
Measuring dinosaur lengths! In the video I said the t-rex was too long for my house but I was mistaken - it was the Apatosaurus (not listed on the graph but mentioned in the lesson plans).
I always feeling like a dork doing video reviews but they are so handy to me so here you go...
As promised, here is the link to assembling a double lapbook. You'll need two file folders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brojT99jzdA
This unit study was a resounding success. Off the top of my head, my children can tell me (you) the following things that they didn't know before we completed this week long study:
- definition of a dinosaur
- what a paleontologist does
- what it means to be extinct
- several names of different dinosaurs
- what a fossil is
- what dinosaurs ate before and after man sinned
- that we believe in creation, not evolution (using those terminology)
In addition, we reiterated how dinosaurs fit into the Bible regarding when they were created and that they were on Noah's ark, and had lively discussions about what might have happened to make them extinct.
*I* learned too. Perhaps I should have already known this but I didn't know that the brontosaurus is no longer a dinosaur. The brontosaurus was named after fossils were mismatched - the wrong head put on a body - so in actuality it never "existed." The apatosaurus is the brontosaurus body with the correct head. I remember coloring the brontosaurus in kindergarten. I also straightened out several other facts in my head to give me more biblical grounding when discussing this topic with others.
We finished out the unit by watching this DVD.
It was on loan from friends and while not super entertaining it was good. Very factual and well done but perhaps not the funnest video ever created. That said, I think it's okay to teach children to watch things that are used as a tool to glean information rather than just entertain them so we did finish the first DVD and I was impressed that they were able to answer the question quiz at the end of the segment!
Xavier's request for a unit study was farms. I couldn't find a sweet and tidy lapbook like I did for dinosaurs so I'm piecing my own together for them to do when we take our next school break! I'm working on tying in farmers and farming in the Bible...if anyone wants to share resources appropriate for a 5 and 6 1/2 year old I'm game to listen!
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