DAY THREE: Finding Fossils
Welcome to our “Digging up Dinosaur Discoveries! An Amazing DIY Dinosaur at Home Camp Week” series. For Day 3 of our camp week, we focused on dinosaur fossils: what types of fossils there are and how they’re formed! Read on for themed ideas on books, writing prompts, interactive games, crafts, snacks, and more!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
INTRO
What is a fossil? Many kids – especially older ones – have likely heard of fossils before. We started off our day talking about what they knew & what they wanted to learn. To recap, we all read through a few of the sections in a page provided by science.lovetoknow, which also contains a brief (less than 3 min) video that illustrates the fossilization process they describe: Explaining Fossils for Kids. As we’re learning about fossils, there is talk about dinosaurs dying, but the video is not as graphic as some out there 🙂
WHAT TO WATCH
There are quite a few fossil-themed education and fun videos out there. These are the few we picked from:
- Magic School Bus – Busasaurus S2E3. Who doesn’t love the Magic School Bus 🙂 Our classroom friends travel back in time after visiting a paleontologist!
- Fossils for Kids | Learn all about how fossils are formed, the types of fossils and more! by From Clarendon Learning. This is a about a 10 min animated video that provides a good overview of fossils: how they are formed, different types, etc..
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our themed snack of the day, we created “dinosaur fossils” using pretzels. We buried them in ground up graham crackers (which to our kiddos was just as fun creating), and then had them create a dinosaur skeleton.
EDUCATIONAL GAMES (Online and Printable)
If you’re kiddos haven’t maxed out their screen time for the day, pbslearningmedia.com has a cute game where kids can ‘dig’ for fossils. Fossil Finder: Dinosaur Train. It’s a little more on the fun side but definitely themed to ‘finding fossils’ and allows kids some keyboard practice.
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For our fossil-themed day, we picked a fossil themed book with pictures. The book definitely detailed some dinosaur favorites but as a bonus also had some information about some other prehistoric and pre-dinosaur creatures!
- Fossils for Kids by Ashley Hall
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: DINOSAUR, FOSSIL, BONE, IMPRINT
For our older children, we actually went a slightly different route and created a comic for them instead of having just a writing prompt. While it took us much longer to create, it was a cute variation for their writing activity & they definitely had fun with it 🙂
CRAFTS
For our craft of the day, we created dinosaur fossil imprints using dinosaur figurines and some play doh. They even created a ‘fossilized’ dino nest. If you’ve got a few dino figurines, you can turned it into a bit of a game to see if we could figure out which dino made the footprint after they were all created 🙂
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: DIY Summer Camps.
Happy Learning!
