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You are here: Home / First Grade / Dinosaurs by Design
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Dinosaurs by Design

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Ben and I wrapped up our study of dinosaurs. It was a really fun study, one that I had pretty much avoided for as long as I could. I was nervous about studying dinosaurs because I just wasn’t ready to broach the topic of evolution.

But thanks (once again!) to Ami over at www.homeschoolshare.com, I was able to teach this unit from a creation perspective with all of her little lapbook helps. We didn’t completely follow Ami’s lesson plan for her dinosaur unit for a couple of reasons: 1. we didn’t have access to the same books and 2. I didn’t want to spend as much time on the unit as she had designed. However, in my search for a decent book on dinosaurs from a creationist perspective, I found the book Dinosaurs by Design, by Duane T. Gish. It was perfect!

I did talk with Ben briefly about the theory of evolution. When I told him what some scientists believe about the chain of events leading up to the development of dinosaurs (one celled organism changed to a fish which changed to a frog, which changed to a lizard, which changed to a dinosaur), he laughed heartily and simply said, “why can’t they just beleive that God created all of those animals?” Wish I had an answer for that one.

We also discussed that most of the time museums will talk about dinosaurs living millions of years ago, but that we believe it was only thousands of years ago. I’m not sure that had much of an effect on him, since at 6, he doesn’t have much of a concept of time. We haven’t really started using a timeline yet, but that might be something I need to consider now.

I posted a few days ago about our trip to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. There is a slideshow of pictures from that field trip on my blog entry from last week, entitled, Dinosaurs, if you havne’t seen it. I wanted to mention again about how amazing the dinosaur exhibit is there. Also, one thing I noticed was that in our interaction with staff there, there was no mention of millions of years ago or evolution. I’m not sure if it was a conincidence or if they are trying to be sensitive to the creationists, but it was nice. I know that Ben would have been outspoken had he heard much of that kind of talk!

Here are some pictures of our lapbook. Thank you again to Ami, who designed most of the minit books that went into it!

Here Ben poses with the 2 main books we used for this study.


This is the front of our lapbook, with Ben’s handwriting sample and the cover of the book, color-copied.


Here’s the lapbook when you first open it up. On the left flap is a minit book about the days of creation, on the right flap are our vocabulary words, and in the center a dinosaur world map minit book and a small book about reptiles.


Here you can see what the days of creation book looks like opened up. I typed out the different things God created and Ben matched them up to the right day.


I did the vocabulary words similarly to the days of creation, typing out the definitions and then letting Ben match them up.


Here you can see the dinosaur world atlas and reptile books opened up. For the atlas, Ben colored pictures of several dinosaurs and then matched them up to the continents on which they were found. He used our Dinosaur Atlas book to figure these out. The reptile book was made by cutting out pictures of diffferent reptile and gluing them down. In the center, Ben drew a dinosaur.


This picture shows the lapbook with the added extenders opened up. The top extender has a wheel which examines what possibly happened to the dinosaurs after the Great Flood. Under the wheel is a little minit book with adjectives describing dinosaurs. In the center of the lapbook is our dinosaur graph, where we were able to compare the sizes of different dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs were small like chickens, some were over 40 feet tall! Glued to the bottom extender is a coloring book we printed from www.enchantedlearning.com. On the underside of this extension is a print-out of Psalm 8, the Psalm Ben is currently memorizing. We chose this Psalm for now because it celebrates creation.


This is just a closer-up picture of the wheel and dinosaur adjectives book.


Here is the adjectives book opened up. Each page has a picture of a dinosaur on which Ben has written a different adjective. We read the book Hairy, Scarey, Ordinary, by Brian P. Cleary, to go along with this lesson. Ben loves this set of books, called Words Are Categorical. They are great for grammar lessons! Some of the adjectives Ben chose to describe dinosaurs include: enormous, ugly, stupid, mean, stinky, and extinct.


Here is an up close picture of the dinosaur coloring book. Each page inside has a picture of a different dinosuar, along with some facts about what they ate and how large they were. There is also some handwriting practice inside there.


Psalm 8, found on the bottom extender under the Dinosaur Coloring Book.


Though I was a bit hesitant to study dinsaurs, we had a great time. I found about 6 decent-sized toy dinosaurs at Wal-mart for under $1 each. I brought these out after we had studied a bit. Ben was able to name all of them but one! His ability to remember details about things astonishes me. One of the dinosaurs (velociraptor, I think) is known by his giant toenail. Ben immediately noticed that on one of the toys and that’s how he knew it was a velociraptor. I had not even noticed the toenail!

Thanks for stopping by and be sure to leave any comments if you have any! We love to hear what you think about what we’re studying!


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