Devolve Me

Wow!  After receiving the newest e-mail from Charlie's Playhouse I immediately went to the site and discovered a really fun link.  It's called Devolve Me and it's from The Open University.

Check out my kids:
Nate Devolved
Nikolai Devolved

Some other fun links from Charlie's Playhouse

Dinosaurs

Useful links:
Dinosaur SUE at the Field Museum
YouTube: Bill Nye the Science Guy - Dinosaurs
YouTube: Bill Nye the Science Guy - Fossils
PBS: What Killed The Dinosaurs? game (requires Flash)
Dinosaurs: Discovery Channel
Dinosaur Crafts from Kaboose
Dinosaur Illustrations
D'Aiguebelle Dinosaur Skeletons


Related blog posts:
Dinosaur Lapbook

Dinosaur Lapbook

I wanted to share the dinosaur lapbook that we recently did.  It has a couple of games in it and is a HUGE hit with both of my boys.  I have a feeling they will spend many hours playing with it, which is nice because it was a considerable amount of work!  This is actually going to be a lapbook of prehistory, not just dinosaurs, but so far only the dinosaur portions are completed. 

The printables came from Homeschool Share (free) and the Dinosaurs Learn 'N Folder, which must have been a freebie at Currclick at one point because I'm too cheap to pay for things like this.  The empty portions will cover other aspects of prehistory.

 

Prehistory Time Line

We've begun work on a prehistory time line so that we have a visual aid for reviewing the information we've learned so far in our studies.  I scoured the internet looking for ideas and found very little.  It seems that most homeschoolers teach from a creationist perspective and I was looking for an evolutionary perspective.  I finally found what I was looking for at funschooling.net.  Combining that with pictures from Nova's The Missing Link: A Brief History of Life gave us the base for our timeline.

Pictures of our time line are coming soon.

I'm thinking about rounding out our studies with a recipe from the free online Geologic and Paleontologic Cookbook from Kentucky Geological Survey.

Other links you might find useful:
Satori Smiles (blog) Prehistory post
National Geographic Prehistoric Time Line: Rise of Life
Universe Timeline

Trilobite Masks

Today we made trilobite masks to go along with our prehistory studies.  I found the directions for the masks at the Kentucky Geological Survey site.  What a wonderful site just full of resources!  Here are the boys with their masks.  They both picked the same type of trilobite to make, Psychepyge, because it looks like it has a sword on its head. 

We also made impressions in clay after another discussion on fossils and filled out this worksheet, also from the Kentucky Geological Survey website.