Memorial Day Weekend and Dinosaurs!

I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend!! If your weekends were anything like mine, they were jam packed full of fun things to do outside! It was a wonderful little tease of what summer will be like in just 6 MORE SCHOOL DAYS! I know 6 days sounds like nothing but my little ones are definitely ready for a break and SO. AM. I!! 

Well let me preface my little post with a video from my wonderful (yet slightly very redneck) Memorial Day weekend. Now let me preface this by saying that I am probably the girliest girl I know. I love shopping, high heels, makeup, etc. If a kindergarten boy would scream "eww girl stuff!" at it, it is safe to say I would LOVE it! So this weekend I did something a little outside my normal comfort zone, I went to a NASCAR race! Let me tell you, I loved every single minute of it! Here is a little clip of the race. BEFORE you click it be sure to turn your volume down because it is SUPER LOUD!! 

Anywho, so back to school today and back to learning about dinosaurs! Let me tell you that I was not at all excited about dinosaurs before teaching this unit. I thought they were cool and could be a lot of fun but none of the ideas I found online really seemed fun enough to do in class and I did not think my students would enjoy it. This was a unit that I wanted to get really into, but 
I struggled to find some new ideas. Then I stumbled across YOUR blogs and so many of you have WONDERFUL dinosaur ideas posted on your blogs! This is just one more reason (as if I didn't already have enough) for me to justify my addiction to the blogging world. I stumbled across Allison from Climbing the Monkey Bars and her great dinosaur ideas and Herding Kats in Kindergarten had a wonderful paleontologist activity and SOOOO many more! Needless to say I am finally excited about dinosaurs!! Wooho!!

So today we started with the fun activity from Herding Kats and boy oh boy were they excited! They LOVED this. What we did is we started by discussing fossils and where fossils can be found. Then we did this super fun activity from the Smithsonian's website. They loved learning about the different tools used to dig up fossils and about how important it is so wrap up the bones when transferring them to the museum. They loved putting the bones back together too! Later in the afternoon we had to use "paleontologist tools" to dig our own fossils out of mini "glaciers". Our glaciers made a mess when they melted but their desks are so nice and clean now! I swear I scrub their desks with everything under the sun to get rid of the glue marks yet today after having the kids dig out their fossils, their desks are the cleanest they've been in awhile. I guess I can stop buying products to clean their desks with now ;) I can't wait for the other fun activities we are doing later this week! I will keep posting about them as the week goes!