A dino hunting we will go.

This week in Zach’s class they’ve been studying dinosaurs. To end this special dino filled week the class is having the Great Dinosaur Extravaganza today. (Seriously – nothing is funnier than hearing a bunch of snaggle tooth first graders trying to say “extravaganza” lol) Tuesday his teacher sent home a sheet about this extravaganza. The students were to bring in dinosaur related books, posters, toys, etc PLUS they were supposed to do one of the following to bring in on Friday:

• draw or color a dinosaur picture
• make a dinosaur diorama
• make a dinosaur fact poster
• make a dinosaur fact book

I’m going to say it’s very safe to assume that most kids will probably bring in a dinosaur picture they colored that their parents either printed or got out of a color book. But did my son want to take that easy route? No. It’s not like we live with dino-obsessed Ryan so we have literally twenty dinosaur coloring books. It would just be much too easy for him to find a page in one of the coloring books to color. Oh no no no. He wanted to created a fact book AND a diorama. After it taking him almost all of the time we had during the week for him to gather the information for his fact book alone I managed to talk him out of the diorama also.

What we did with the fact book was for both of us to sit down Tuesday and think about what we wanted to put in the fact book, and how we wanted it to look. We worked on how he wanted to phrase the questions, how he wanted the pages set up, and then I showed him around the websites he would find his answers on. Wednesday I gave Zach a piece of paper with his questions, opened the websites, and told him to find the answers. (I had to help him some, but really only on big stupid words that the letters don’t say the sounds that they’re supposed to) Then we got together the dinosaur images we wanted to use. After he went to bed I opened Photoshop and started putting the pages together.

Thursday (after doing his whole weekly homework packet because we were too busy doing the other stuff the other days lol) I sat with him on the computer while he put together almost the entire covers to his book, and I guided him in typing the title and info on the back cover. Next, we went to my mom’s to print, came home and he used his questions and answers sheet to fill in the answers on the sheets. Then we sat in the hallway with pillows and blankets for 45 minutes reading Ramona the Pest because the weather decided we should have tornado causing conditions last night. Thank God there were none, we just ended up getting some bad straight line winds, but even more thankfully, no damage. After everything calmed down we ate dinner then got back to work. Zach then colored everything for his book and folded the pages. Since we had to use some really strong glue to glue the cardstock pages together I did that while he cut out a piece of felt to use as the spine to his book. At last we were done. We literally worked yesterday from the time he got home from school until he went to bed at 8:30.

And now… Zach’s Dino Fact Book!