Homeschool Lesson Plans:

Dinosaurs for Kids Activities

You can make homeschool lesson plans stretch to cover the whole of Earth's history! Our homeschooling lesson plans are full of different activities you can try to awaken your child's interest and cover lots of topics along the way.

This is one of our home school lesson plans that comes in three parts.

You'll see from the first part of our homeschool science curriculum: Dinosaurs for Kids activities that we've already picked a Period of Earth's history. Have a look there to see the activities which will form the basis of our homeschool lesson plans.

Your aim in this lesson plan is to cover the whole of Earth's history. We did these activities from age 9 but you could adapt the plans to include younger children and go on up through High School.

You can see the chalk we've used to show the calcium deposits laid down in the Cretaceous. You can encourage your child to use lots of ways to bring Earth's history to life. We used newspaper articles, fact sheets, print-outs and covered geography by downloading some maps from Wikipedia.

The internet is a marvellous place to add to your kids home school curriculum plans.

• There's a brilliant prehistoric timeline and lots of other useful facts here: National Geographic
• You can see dinosaurs brought to life with videos and kids games here at the BBC.

Drawing a dinosaur is a great way for your child to get to grips with Earth's history. One look at the fascinating creatures that once reigned on Earth raises all sorts of interesting ideas to add to your homeschooling lesson plans.

How did animals evolve? What was this Planet like 4,500 million years ago?

Dinosaur Activities

You can make your dinosaur drawings more fun by adding things to them! We used lots of simple techniques to add to our homeschool display and make it more interesting:

• Paper fold-outs are a great way to show how a specific aspect of anatomy evolved over time (e.g. wings).
• Tabs. Catherine had great fun with the fish-type animal pictured below which you could pull out from the open jaws of an approaching large predator. My two certainly liked the dinosaur danger aspect!
• Pipe cleaners. Sticking a bent-over pipe-cleaner on the back of card is an easy way to make a dinosaur jump out of your Dinosaurs for Kids project.
• If you look at our page on homeschool Paper Craft For Kids you'll see our flying pterosaur and leaping ichthyosaur actually makes dinosaurs for kids come alive!

If drawing dinosaurs isn't something your kids want to do, you can download fantastic dinosaur images from the internet like this one to go with your homeschool Dinosaurs for Kids activities.

Planet Dinosaur

DVDs are a great way of adding to your homeschooling curriculum plans. Our two kids loved this series; it's got up-to-date information on all the latest dinosaur discoveries.

Dinosaurs for Kids

There's no substitute for actually getting out there and finding your own fossils. Homeschool lesson plans are best when they include some field trips, and there's nothing quite so amazing as splitting open a boring piece of rock and finding your own quartz-filled ammonite. This one was found by William:

A local Geology book would be a real help to you when you come to design your homeschool curriculum. If there are no areas with the right rocks near where you live, why not plan a fossil-hunting holiday as part of your Dinosaurs for Kids activities?

We are lucky to live near one of the best sites in the world for finding tracks from Triassic dinosaurs. The most perfect ones are in the Museum but this dinosaur footprint was left exposed on the tide line so we took some plaster of Paris down and made this cast. You can just make out the three toes of a meat-eating dinosaur that walked on his hind legs.

Any ideas like that you can add in to homeschool lesson plans are obviously brilliant for making your subject come to life.

Why not make your own fossil plaster cast as part of your Dinosaurs for Kids activities? If you have a real fossil at home, you could make a cast of it using modelling clay and plaster of Paris. Just put your fossil in modelling clay and fill the indent it leaves behind with plaster of Paris.

More Activities for Your Homeschool Lesson Plans

Another good way to make your homeschooling lesson plans include subjects like design and technology is to include practical model making.

You can see how in Homeschooling Activities: How to make a Dinosaur Robot from junk.

More ideas, including keeping a pet Triops to see first-hand a creature that actually lived in the age of the dinosaurs, are in the second part of our home school lesson plan. You can see it here: Homeschooling Science: Dinosaur Kids Activity

Homeschool lesson plans come in all shapes and sizes. You can try more of our homeschool science lessons here:

• Homeschool Unit Studies: Sea Creatures for Kids.
• Take Home School Science into Orbit! Make your own model solar system.
• Homeschool Science: Rainforest for Kids Activities

I hope these different activities have given you ideas for the sorts of things you can include to bring your own homeschool lesson plans to life.

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