DAY TWO: A Day of Excitement with Dino Eggs & Babies
Welcome to our “Digging up Dinosaur Discoveries! An Amazing DIY Dinosaur at Home Camp Week” series. For Day 2 of our camp week, we focused on dinosaur eggs & babies! Read on for themed ideas on crafts, links to educational and interactive games, food snacks, and more!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
INTRO
Has your little one ever wondered what dinosaur eggs or babies look like? We had a cute little Q&A session with them (with Answers provided by scholastic.com or google 🙂 ). We let them play ‘interviewer’ and ask any questions they had on dinosaur eggs and babies. The scholastic.com page: Dinosaur Eggs & Babies was definitely helpful as we could find a number of similar Q&As on that page!
WHAT TO WATCH
For our video of the day, we picked a few scenes from “Dinosaur Eggs & Babies”. It’s on a few streaming sites but you can also find it on YouTube here. It is a documentary and not many ‘cartoonish’ scenes, so may not hold the attention of younger kids. At about 12-15 minutes, they talk about dinosaur eggs & their characteristics; about half way in, they talk about dinosaur nests; and towards the end, they talk about fossilized nests and babies. So, depending on your child’s interest & sensitivity, you may want to preview which scenes to show them.
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our themed snack of the day, we created “dinosaur nests” using pretzels and chocolate eggs. If you don’t have chocolate eggs on hand, you could also use almonds, chocolate covered almonds, m&ms, blueberries, etc…
EDUCATIONAL GAMES (Online and Printable)
If your little kiddos are in the mood for a little bit of learning fun & haven’t maxed out their screen time yet, the Field Museum in Chicago has a fun chat feature with their largest dinosaur, Maximo. While he does have some preprogrammed answers, it’s still fun for the kids to “ask” and/or “chat” with a dinosaur. Since today was themed around Dinosaur Eggs and Babies, we asked about dinosaur nests, how large his egg was, etc… Definitely fun & interactive for the kids!
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. We did not find an non-fiction picture book specifically geared toward Dinosaur Eggs, but we did read through a few fiction ones:
- Tiny T-Rex and the Impossible Hug by Jonathan Stutzman. This one is a picture book and geared toward younger kids (pre-elementary). While it’s not necessarily about a dinosaur egg, it’s a cute book that follows a young T-Rex as he tries to hug his friend.
- The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth. This is actually a chapter book, so you might not get through it one day 🙂
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: DINOSAUR, EGG, NEST
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices. This was our writing prompt of the day but definitely pick something your kiddo might be interested in writing about!
- If you were a baby dinosaur that just hatched, what would be your first thoughts of the world?
CRAFTS
Our craft of the day tied into our weeklong project… (Dinosaurs are generally massive, right?? So are the projects this week!). For our craft of the day, we created ‘dinosaur eggs’ using paper mache balloons. All you need is TIME + flour, water, balloons, & some old newspaper or magazines from the mail! It takes a while for the balloons to dry and you may need a second layer, so you definitely have to plan ahead. We used the recipe from instructables.com: Paper Mache With Flour.
Once they dried, we covered them in tissue and placed them onto nests (strips of old package boxes mixed with brown construction paper) next to our larger cardboard dinosaurs.
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: DIY Summer Camps.
Happy Learning!
