Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Dinosaurs!!!!!

I'm creating my first unit study ever. I've done unit studies before, but only the pre-created kind that I can get from sites like Homeschool Share. But, this time I don't have ready access to all the books for the unit we want to do at Homeschool Share, so I'm creating my own for the first time.

They want to study dinosaurs. Lord help me, I still haven't decided if I am in the young earth or old earth camp on this, so I don't know how to approach the times and such. I'm thinking that for now, I'll just go with the mainstream opinion of the Earth being billions of years old and sidestep the dates as much as possible, replacing the "billions of years ago" references with "a long time ago" type stuff and PRAY that Missa doesn't decide to ask me how long ago that "a long time ago" is.

So, for the month of February and maybe a little bit of March I will be doing a unit study for science on dinosaurs. I have a dozen or so books that I got yesterday at the library, and this weekend I plan to go back and get more.

If you've ever created a unit study, do you have any advice for me on this? Missa is VERY interested in dinosaurs and right now is reading one of the books I got yesterday as a first wave of books to consider for the unit, and I know she's going to want to really dig in while at the same time I have a 3 year old who just likes dinosaurs. (and one of the books I got will really appeal to Lydia and her strange fascination with gross things, it is called "Jurassic Poop" of all things LOL) I'm a little nervous about this, since I've only done a handful of unit studies before and NEVER created my own pretty much from scratch like this.

2 comments:

Anna said...

Hi, I found you from HSS. I just wanted to say that we also want to do the Dinosaurs unit. I haven't even gone searching for the books yet for the unit. I tend to get ahead of myself a lot.
I haven't yet written a unit myself, not even sure I am talented enough to do that.
The Indianapolis Children's Museum has a huge Dinosaur display. Just wanted to mention that to you. :)

Cat said...

oh really? Hmmmmm Scott has a week off here right at the very start of our dinosaur unit and Indianapolis isn't too far to consider a field trip....... I bet my girls would love that if there isn't a good dinosaur display here in Ohio.