One of the stations in my therapy gym right now is a dinosaur dig. I have had this idea in my mind for a long time and finally had time to construct it during the winter school break!
The end result is a bin of sand with “dino bones” to hunt for, and their skeletons’ shapes laid out on laminated paper next to the bin so that they can be dug up and matched to where they go.
I made this by finding dino skulls on google, printing them out, resizing them and printing them out again because I was way too ambitious the first time (😉), assembling a general shape of each of those dinos’ skeletons out of Q-tips and half-Q-tips, and then tracing those shapes onto black paper so that it would be an outline, so the kids could find the Q-tips and match them up to the outline, like a puzzle.
I also made spines and tail spikes for the stegosaurus out of laminated paper, so all in all the bin has a whole lot of Q-tips and halves, four skulls, and several spines and spikes.
It’s in the same place in my room that my pirate-themed one was, which means that there’s still a balance beam over a “pool of sharks” at the base of the table. My kids have really enjoyed standing and balancing on the balance beam while they focus, so I probably won’t take it away even though it confuses the paleontology narrative a little. 😉
[Image description: Both pictures show the sand bin as described above, with the laminated skeleton outline pictures out to the side. One picture shows it before I had mixed all the “bones” into the bin, so they are all just sitting on top of the sand. The other shows it with them mixed into the sand, so the kids have to search for them. End descriptions.]
