Bumblebee loves dinosaurs. Dinosaur toys, dinosaur books, dinosaur movies, dinosaur documentaries... I'm sure you get the idea. Optimus Prime & Scooby-Doo love dinosaurs too, but not nearly as much.
When we first started talking about taking a family vacation this past summer, and our initial plans were scrapped for costing too much, I decided that what we needed to do was something both closer to home and lots of fun. So I planned a dinosaur trip. There are LOTS of dinosaur museums here in Texas, I didn't realize just how many until I started looking into them. We had a blast at two different dinosaur parks and the Dinosaur State Park, and we even decided to expand our trip into two zoos and an aquarium for some variety.
My kids purchased little dinosaur toys almost everywhere we went (because what we REALLY needed in this house was more dinosaur toys!), as well as dinosaur puzzles and dinosaur eggs (that "hatched" in water).
They learned lots of stuff about dinosaurs and saw lots of animals and fish. All in all the trip was a total blast.
Then, when we got home it seemed only fitting to do some dinosaur themed schoolwork for a week.
I had some dinosaur maze books I had picked up on our trip, as well as some dinosaur dot-to-dots and coloring pages I printed up from education.com. We also had some dinosaur schoolwork books I had picked up from Target's dollar section back when they were babies and a book of jigsaw puzzles ("Discovering Dinosaurs!") I had picked up at a Waldenbooks back when they were going out of business. (A side note - if you have never seen jigsaw puzzle books before they are really awesome and you should pick them up. They are big board books that have a half dozen or so puzzles in them and on the opposite page is a few educational paragraphs about the puzzle, we are going to be using them a lot for first grade.)
So our "textbooks" about the subject were the books I had bought during our trip and from Target, as well as the worksheets I had printed up. Our activity was the puzzle book (we got to do a puzzle a day), and our book was "The Magic Schoolbus in the Time of the Dinosaurs" by Joanna Cole.
The workbooks from Target were grades K-2, but I have to be honest some of the activities were more geared towards second graders. However, they still had fun and the book introduced them to codes, which we had never done before, and they caught onto that pretty quick. Each dinosaur that was covered had a code at the bottom to translate to find out what the dinosaur's Latin name meant.
By the time the trip and schoolwork was over we had been on dinosaurs for almost two weeks, and we were definitely all ready to give it up, but everyone had lots of fun.
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