Update: We finished our fossil unit! You can find the complete unit for purchase here.
The unit includes:
- Lab book, add-on activities, recipes, explanations, cut and paste timelines and more.
- Make mold and cast fossils
- Make fossil bone dough
- Go on a fossil hunt
- Learning about how we date dinosaur bones
Hands-on learning with fossils
It’s been a busy few weeks with school getting out, prepping some curriculum for schools and teaching a preschool class. There hasn’t been nearly enough time to pour into the fossil unit to get it up to the place I want it to be!
I am so excited to learn about fossils while making this fossil unit and have so many ideas of fun add-on activities and fossil worksheets like gummy worm fossils, edible amber fossils, edible sediment layers…the list goes on (although not all of it is quite so tasty). I even ordered some foam fossil puzzles to bury for the dig – of course, I will include a whole section on making your own fossils to dig up if you don’t want to find a foam or wood fossil puzzle set.
The lab is almost complete. Just a couple more pages of design work will have it wrapped up. That leaves the parent-teacher guides and add-on activities to adjust the STEM curriculum to just the right level for your kid(s). One of the reasons I try to put so much design and thought into multiple levels of add-ons is so that you can do science as a family, and do science that is challenging and engaging to all kids at all different levels! Creating fossil activities for elementary students and lesson plans for 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade beyond is definitely a challenge but well worth it when I see my kids getting to do science as a team.
While life is bustling and full to the brim, I am hoping that between riding the trails with my littles and cooking dinner I can get everything completed and out to you next week for some great science fun!! Here’s to making a great, in-depth, scientifically accurate fossil unit for kids to learn about their favorite creatures – dinosaurs.
