This is a little late getting posted, but I wanted to show how my kiddos had fun making this. I had a tough time getting a large box, and what I ended up doing was cutting up a box and extending it. Well, you know when you plan on studying dinosaurs, you get big ideas that don't always pan out....so we never did get our GINORMOUS diorama. The boys thought we had to have the biggest one ever. So, this came up a bit short. But the kids still thought it was cool enough--especially when we turned off the room lights and plugged in our red string lights (the kind in the tube). Yes, they just had to put in their plastic figurines (not what I had intended), and made it a bit crowded in that little habitat; but at least they made lots of background scenery, dinosaur nests, eggs, and volcanoes...no clay...just flour, salt dough. They made realistic-looking fossils, too. You don't see those here, because they just couldn't wait to take them home!
Studying the "Terrible Lizards" is always such a wonderful opportunity to play with vocabulary and work with synonyms for ordinary words like "big". We focused on words other than big to describe dinosaurs--words like humongous, ginormous, titanic, mammoth, enormous. They sure had fun with those words. Meat-eaters, we called "carnivores". Plant-eaters were "herbivores". Then, they asked, what are we?! Some second graders actually knew the word "omnivores".
Every teacher's just gotta love studying dinosaurs! I learn something new every year. And who knows, these extinct creatures may come back....According to the latest news, Jurassic Park's nightmare may not be too far-fetched!
