After taking a close look at dinosaur fossils and the clues they left us, then examining dinosaurs by type and age, we closed out our dinosaur study with a look at some of the theories about extinction and a review of our other units.

We got most of our information about extinction from our dinosaur books (listed at the bottom of this post) — they did a great job of showing us the different theories about gradual extinction versus sudden extinction.  If you don’t have those books, this article explains it in-depth, although you’ll have to do a bit of translation to make it more kid-friendly.

We also used our books to tell us a bit about who survived the mass extinction event — this would have been a good place to continue on with a unit study of mammals, although we did not go that far.

We then used a few materials from Every Star is Different’s Dinosaur unit to review.  I seem to have forgotten to take any pictures, but I remember that the girls loved sorting the dinosaurs by continent (the continent they were found on as our continents are now, anyway) — and this was a great segue to our continent studies!

They also had a blast with these Who Am I? cards from the Dinosaur Language unit.  These stayed on our shelves for a quite a few weeks as the girls liked to take turns quizzing each other!

 

Finally, we visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which has an amazing dinosaur fossil collection!  I made a couple of scavenger hunts for the girls to do there, and you can get the free printable when you click on that picture above.

We rely heavily on wonderful children’s books for all of our themed studies, and here are the books we used to study extinction as part of our dinosaur study:

Usborne’s Encyclopedia of World History

The Complete Book of Dinosaurs, by Dougal Dixon

Dinosaurium, by Lily Murray

Ultimate Dinopedia, by Don Lessem

Dinosaur Encyclopedia, by IglooBooks

 

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