Kidding Around: Dinosaur Party

The theme for this month's "Kidding Around" (my monthly K-2nd program) was a perennial kid favorite: Dinosaurs!

As I usually do for this program, I registered 12 kids. It was so popular I ended up allowing in a few extra, bringing the total to 15. I also had a few younger siblings attend, who joined in the fun where they could. It was definitely the best attended K-2nd program I've done in a while.

Here's what we did:

I started out by reading Natasha Wing's book "How to Raise a Dinosaur". It has some fun lift-the-flap elements and mentions the word poop at least once, so I figured it would be a hit with this age group. They seemed to enjoy it, although I do think a little more of the visual humor is evident when reading it one on one.

Next we played a game I called "Dinosaur Tail Tag". It was basically a version of tag where as people are tagged they join arms with the tagger, leading to a large snakelike grouping. I said we were making a giant dinosaur tail.

Our second game was "Pin the Horn on the Triceratops". I used a picture of a Triceratops from openclipart.org and used Paint to remove one of the horns. I then copied and pasted the horn multiple times into a separate document. Here is what I ended up creating: Dinosaur and Horns.

After that we did our craft, which was reassembling a cut out dinosaur skeleton. I used a template from a previous summer reading program to cut out a complete set of skeleton pieces for each child. The children were then encouraged to reassemble the dinosaur and draw around it as they wished.

We ended the program with a snack, which is always a highlight for most kids. However this time it was particularly fun. In addition to Kroger brand dinosaur fruit snacks, we enjoyed eating "dinosaur poop" (a.k.a. chocolate covered jumbo marshmallows). This seemed to be a huge hit with the kids. I even heard positive feedback from parents about it the next day. Definitely something I would do again.

As the kids left they could take home a "If I had a Pet Dinosaur" worksheet I printed from Deceptively Educational.

Next month's "Kidding Around" will be our "Bubble Bash". As the name implies, the plan is to do some experiments and activities involving bubbles. Looking forward to updating you all about how it goes!