Excavating Dinosaurs
Hello everyone! My name is McKenna Crews and this summer I will be an intern with Karen Malone, the Ruby C. Strickland Curator of Education at the Evansville Museum of Art, History & Science. I am going to be a senior this year and am a triple history major studying Public History, General History, and Social Studies Education. I hope to get my masters degree in Public History and then teach for a few years in an urban school district. After that, I hope to become an educational curator or director in a museum. I will be making videos and activities for the next few weeks to help replace some of the traditional summer camps that the museum usually puts on. I hope you enjoy!!
We are going to learn how to be paleontologists and find dinosaurs! You probably have most of the supplies already, or you can run to the dollar store and get everything you need for $1 each! Have so much fun exploring science and being creators.
Excavating is when you dig for things and Paleontology is the study of dinosaurs! So let’s put our thinking caps on and learn and create with me!
You will Need:
Balloons (or Plastic Cups if you or your child has a latex allergy)
Small Dinosaur Toys (the dollar store has some or you can find more realistic ones on amazon)
A Device with Internet
Paper
Coloring Supplies (markers, crayons, colored pencils)
Paper
The Steps:
1. Get out your balloons (or cups) and dinosaurs. Put the dinos in the balloons (or cup).
2. Fill up with balloons with water with the dinos in the balloons (or cups) on a faucet.
3. Put the balloons (or cups) in the freezer to freeze over. This may take the entire night so I recommend doing this the night before you plan to do the activity.
4. Once they are completely frozen, take them out of the freezer and remove the balloon casing (or remove it from the cups).
5. Put your frozen blocks in a cooler or outside where your kids can find them.
Time to Excavate!
6. Go outside and use a hammer or other tools (WITH ADULT SUPERVISION) or even just smash the ice on the ground so kids can get the dinosaurs out.
7. Once they get all of the dinosaurs out it is time for the research or art activity!
Time to Research!
8. If you child is older, have them research what the dinosaurs they found might be. I used https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dino-directory/name/name-az-all.html to look up facts about my dinosaurs and it was a really great resource. I Googled “dinosaur identification” and looked at the images section to find similarities and know which dinosaur to look up. You can also have your kids look for other reliable sources as well. This can help them to be able to identify credible sources in the future as well.
9. While researching, kids can look for:
a. The name of the dinosaur
b. When it lived
c. Type of dinosaur
d. What it ate
e. Where it was found
f. Any other cool fact
Time to Create!
10. If your child is younger, or if your child is artistic, they can do the art activity!
11. Have your kids draw and design a dinosaur of their own! Ask them to think about the other dinosaurs they have seen and use that as a basis. Dinosaurs also had a lot of really cool physical characteristics like feathers or scales (fabric, sequins) and they could add those to their artwork as well.
12. After finishing their artwork, they should create:
a. A name for their dinosaur
b. What the dinosaur ate (its diet)
c. Where its fossils were found
d. The time period that their dinosaur lived
e. A cool fact about the dino
f. What time of dinosaur it was
13. You did it!
Conclusion:
I hope that during this experiment and activity that you were able to gain some skills! I hope kids learned what it is like to dig dinosaurs out of ice, that they learned what being a paleontologist is, how to research, what a credible source is, and how to create new things!