One day your children are in school and the next day your child’s school and your office are cohabiting ……in your home. You’ve been told you will be homeschooling. For some of you it means you are now the teacher. There’s online resources such as YouTube videos, virtual tours and Pinterest to help you navigate through this. If you are not already on Pinterest, sign up immediately especially if you have elementary age children. There are hundreds of ideas to make learning at home fun. Even this post might eventually end up being on Pinterest!

During part of my teaching career I taught preschool and kindergarten which meant we explored the land of the dinosaurs for at least a couple of weeks each year. It’s a staple unit of study in early childhood education. Young children, especially little boys, love dinosaurs!!

Back in the day, before Pinterest, we would buy theme books at the teacher store and come up with our own ideas. I liked to keep my young students moving getting out of the classroom was a way to do that. We had an extremely long hallway at our school and the idea that it would be the perfect place to measure the length of our favorite dinosaurs from tip to tail end found a spot my plan book.

There are several benefits of doing this activity with your child. Your child will learn facts about dinosaurs. Your child will be outside in the fresh air. Remember, they are probably used to a recess time and need a break away from workbooks and screen time. Your child can be involved. Let them color the dinosaur markers for the yard. They can assist you in measuring out the dinosaur lengths and that is math enrichment. Your child will walk the height or the length of a dinosaur and may never look at a dinosaur skeleton the same way ever again.

I found several freebies about dinosaurs on Pinterest that might help you get started. Click on the pictures and it will take you to the site to find the printable.

I particularly liked this free dinosaur booklet. For the younger children it is a cut and paste activity. What really drew me to this activity was the shadow of the man standing next to each dinosaur picture.

There are several sites that have free dinosaur color sheets. This was the one that I found that had several different dinosaurs to color.

For the little ones I found a couple of little readers.

You will find, especially if you are new to Pinterest, that Pinterest kindly suggests other dinosaur pins to explore and you might be able to find even better printable sites than I did.

Now it’s time to measure those dinosaurs!! After the dinosaurs have been colored, cut out and the dinosaur’s length written on it (or you could use the dinosaur cards from the first link I gave you) they then need to put on sticks, orange cones or something else that will allow them to be seen above ground. If you have a nice long fence to put them on that would be even better because then your child could step back and see the differences. Next you need some sort of measuring tool. When I did this activity I was fortunate to find a 60 foot tape measure in my husband’s tool box. I held the tape measure and a student held the end and walked down the hall until I told them to stop (or yelled if it was the brontosaurus). They would then put the picture on the wall. After they were all up we would take our dinosaur walk reviewing each one. We left our activity up for several days and we’d see other classes taking a look.

I hope this is an nice activity break for you and your child. Have fun with it. My classes always enjoyed it. I hope your child will too!