DAY ONE: Orientation Day
Welcome to our “Digging up Dinosaur Discoveries! – An Amazing DIY Dinosaur at Home Camp Week ” series. For Day 1, we kept this very light and focused more on introducing the concept for the week with fun crafts, experiments, and food crafts / snacks. Read through to check out some ideas.
WEEKLONG PROJECT
On the first day of the week, we introduce the topic as well as giving them a relatively easy weeklong project. For this weeklong project, we had them create “massive” dinosaurs using some cardboard boxes. By the end of the week, we planned to have several large dinosaurs that they could run around and pretend they were in a dinosaur era. We got the idea from adventure-in-a-box.com: DIY Cardboard Dinosaur.
DECORATE THE CAMP AREA
In addition to the child-size dinosaurs we would have around the camp area, we also printed out some dinosaur pages to color & create a dinosaur mural. We found several options for our dinosaur favorites on supercoloring.com: Dinosaur Coloring Pages. They have tons more, so chances are they might have your little one’s favorite dinosaurs too!
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our themed snack of the day, we cooked up some dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets! If your child is so inclined, they can create a mini-scene with some healthy veggies and fruit!
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For our intro to camp day, we chose a book called Dinosaur Days by Joyce Milton. While there are some more modern books on dinosaurs, we had this one in the house & it’s still a good non-fiction book.
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, JURASSIC, TRIASSIC, CRETACEOUS.. Maybe you could even challenge them by spelling out their favorite dinosaur!
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices.
- If you could be any dinosaur for a day, which one would you be and why?
CRAFT
Since our week long project and camp decorating consisted mostly of crafts, we kept this block light as well:
- Story Telling with Dinosaur Sticker Sheets: What kid doesn’t love stickers??? We let them design their own dinosaur scene using these Dinosaur Sticker Scenes and also encouraged them to tell a mini-story to explain why they placed the stickers in certain places. It’s a fun way to get their creative juices flowing 🙂
- A Dinosaur Movement Cube: We actually ended up using this each day cause the kids were excited to roll the dice. The idea & printables comes from k-pages.com: Dinosaur Roll & Move Gross Activity. For the base die, we used our supersized posterboard one: You can find simple instructions here.
STEM ACTIVITY
For our stem activity, we observed and tested grow capsules! Though we bought ours from a Michaels Store, you can get them online through Amazon or sometimes if you’re lucky the Dollar Store. They’re essentially small sponges that are compressed into a small plastic capsule. When you put them in water, the capsule dissolves and the sponge expands into its shape.
To make this more ‘scientific’, we varied the water temperatures to see how they affected how the capsules would ‘grow’ (Directions say use warm / hot water), so it was a good exercise to get them to hypothesize what would happen to each capsule.. Our room temperature capsules definitely did grow eventually though they took much longer.
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!
