Digging For Dinos in The Sandbox

Tristan has been learning about dinosaurs a little here and there over the past year.  Last summer the Larne museum had an exhibit of dinosaurs which we went to.  Larne is a small museum, mainly consisting of  household items from the area.  But this exhibit was very good.

There was a treasure hunt quiz, and an interactive computer on which you had to be the scientist and arrange the bones of the skeleton into the correct place.  There was a skeleton and a couple of replica dinos.  They had one dino head sticking out from the jungle of the wall that would roar and move, which the boys found fun.  Here you can see Phil drawing a picture and Kallista reading more about this dino:

While we were in Regina at Easter, we visited the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.  We only saw half the museum before the children became hungry and tired, but that will give us something to do the next time we return.

The Canadian prairies are known for their dinosaur fossils, especially the areas of Drumheller in Alberta, and Eastend in Saskatchewan.  The children (and us) enjoyed the hands-on fossils and life-size exhibits.

Before we left, we made sure to stop in and say “Hello”, to Megamunch, the resident mechanical dino.  We thought Tristan would love this, but he was actually quite frightened of it at first and left the room.  Then he tried again, and he grew to love Megamunch and mentions him regularly.

Last summer there was an exhibit at the Ulster Museum, but we didn’t know there was a charge for it until we arrived, so we didn’t go in as it was quite a hefty sum for us.  Tristan was looking forward to seeing the dinos, but he is still just young enough that we could convince him the two sets of bones and the pterodactyl flying from the cieling was the exhibit.  He wondered why they weren’t moving, and asked us if their batteries were low and needed charging.  We mumbled, yes, that must be it.  What bad parents we are!

So to try to rectify this parental lapse, Phil took my glow-in-the-dark dinos and buried them in the sand box.  This scene could almost be the Alberta Badlands or the Southwest Saskatchewan town of Eastend, near where in 2011 the Thescelosaurus Assiniboiensis dinosaur was named.

We gave Tristan and Kallista a little spade and brush and set them to digging for the dinos in the sandbox. What kinds could they find?  What color would they be?  How many could they count?  How long would it take?  There were so many factors on this lovely summer day.

Kallista soon grew tired of this, but Tristan had a good time searching for them all.   He had a trowel, rake, and toothbrush to help him dig in addition to his ‘heavy’ equipment of sandbox machinery.

In the end he had all ten of them lined up to count.  This is a good introduction to math concepts: counting, addition, and subtraction.  There are 10 dinos hiding, you’ve found 7, how many more do you still need to find?

Over the course of our dinosaur exhibits, we’ve made dinosaur-shaped sandwiches from cutters and by using bagels and apples.  We also made some painted 3D dino cookies.   Tuesday we shared our paper plate dinos, check them out!

Visit our Dinosaur page for all of our Dino ideas in one place, and our learning about numbers page for more counting activities, and of course, our summer fun page!