Dino Day with the Co-op

**Old Post that I thought I published, but didn't**

Today was my day for co-op (my kids and two others - age 2.5 and 3), which I always enjoy because it's more fun to do some activities with a group of kids. For example, the kids played paleontologist in the sand/water table, digging for the previously made fossils and bones that I cleaned and bleached from a recent chicken and our Thanksgiving turkey. I think this was more fun for the group because they could talk about what they were finding and the pretend play was richer.

To set up the dig site, I dragged our sand/water table from the back yard to our kitchen. I did this to facilitate my adding (and later retrieving) the bones easier and because it was a little cold for outdoor water play. Each child got a shovel and a paintbrush to excavate for the dinosaur bones. I was careful not to include any bones that had sharp edges or that were too small (my 10 month old was playing in the sand table too). The bones themselves were cleaned off after I made chicken broth and turkey broth from the previously roasted carcasses. After rinsing and rubbing all the meat remnants off, I put the bones in a bowl full of bleach for 30 minutes or so and then rinsed before laying them out to dry on rags. I normally don't like using bleach as a disinfectant because I favor natural disinfectants made from thymol, but since these were real animal bones, I wanted to make sure that they were relatively free from bacteria before introducing them into the children's environment.

We talked about how fossilized bones and fossils themselves are very fragile, so paleontologists us special tools that move dust and dirt away from the findings, but are gentle to the piece itself, like paint brushes. The children really enjoyed this activity and went around calling themselves paleontologists discovering dinosaurs.

We also baked and decorated Gingerbread stegosauruses and t-rexes, made pteranodon hats from newspaper (Ross, 1997), and played with the dinosaurs, amongst other toys. It was a very successful co-op day. Admitedly, these activities (with the exception of the dig) are not heavy on the content, but as today was (I believe) a relatively new foray into dinosaur knowledge for the other kids, I think it sparked the interest and gave them a few basics to start with.

Dino art and fossils

Today, we made some dino art, which was guided, yet flexible. My son has tended to shy away from completely open-ended projects and so, I try to get him interested by giving him a starting point. This time, I drew an outline of a T-Rex and wrote T-REX on the paper. RJ recognized all the letters (even the X, which he sometimes mistakes for K) and painted his T-Rex. What I found most exciting was that he really engaged in the activity, starting with painting the dinosaur's bones, then adding "skin" and an eye. I have observed that he tended to shy away from creating things. He has typically wanted an adult to draw something for him. I found this frustrating, because I have always focused on the process, rather than the product, and continually encouraged his creative work. However, his cognition has always been ahead of his motor development, so it's possible that he was frustrated by his inability to create the images that he wanted to. It appears that for him, having the realistic outline today was enough to get him engaged in the activity without sacrificing the open ended creation too much. He even painted a second dinosaur (brachiosaurus), without an outline and I was impressed that it actually resembled brachiosaurus with its long neck. Perhaps, his fine motor development has allowed him the control to feel like he's making what he wants to, which made the process more enjoyable for him.

We also talked about fossils today as we used the dinosaurs to make prints in clay. RJ loved this activity and when we were done with the self-hardening stone clay, he asked to bring out his play-doh to continue. Tomorrow, his fossils will be hardened and on Thursday, when his co-op buddies come over, we will excavate them from the sandbox with paintbrushes like paleontologists.

A note on Sesame Street...

This morning while I was nursing the baby, my dear three-year-old figured out how to turn on the TV in the other room. This is problematic because a.) he has not figured out the TiVO yet and who knows what might be on the TV when he turns it on (although that TV is set to record mostly PBS kids shows, it would probably still be on that channel and appropriate for viewing) and b.) he's a couch potato wanna-be (we limit his viewing, but it's never enough for him), but this morning, it sort of worked out because there was a clip on Sesame Street about Dinosaurs.  Here are the points the clip in Elmo's World made as a little girl narrated a trip to the American Museum of Natural History:

• Dinosaurs are not alive anymore
• We can learn about them at museums like the American Museum of Natural History.
• Paleontologists dig up the fossils and bones and put together skeletons to see how big dinosaurs are
• Barosaurus has the longest neck in North America
• Triceratops has three big horns and a big collar
• Dinosaur eggs are small, even though dinosaurs get really big
• Tyrannosaurus rex has tiny arms and big legs and sharp teeth to eat meat with
• Stegosaurus has plates on its back
• Apatosaurus is humongeous and made of 350 dinosaur bones

Then, Elmo spoke with a dinosaur muppet, who told him the following info:

• Dinosaurs lived 150 million years ago 
• During that time the dinosaurs saw asteroids, watched the sun rise and set, comets, trees with leaves, lakes, and both small and big dinosaurs
• Elmo asked this Dinosaur muppet if he had birds in his neighborhood (you know, like Sesame Street has Big Bird) to which the Dinosaur replied that they had a pterasaur that flew in the sky (not a bird).  Then they did the ridiculous part where Dorothy (Elmo's fish) imagines Elmo morphed into a fuzzy red pterosaur while the dinosaur continues to tell Elmo that Dinosaurs lived alongside frogs, turtles, mice, and crocodiles.
• He went on to tell Elmo that some dinosaurs ate leaves all day long while others ate meat, including other dinosaurs.  

This is all appropriate information, however, it was rattled off so quickly that I wonder how much of it really sank in. If I need to rewind twice just to type notes (not type verbatim) and I'm a decent typist, it's too fast for a 3 year old (Sesame Street's targeted age). While the quick pacing of Sesame Street's clips has been studied (Anderson, Levin & Pugzles Lorch, 1977), it is not implicated as a factor contributing to hyperactivity and/or poor attention spans in preschoolers in the short term. However, in 2004, Christakis found that each hour of television watched (on average) between the ages of one and three years old increased the probability (by 10%) of a reported attention problem by age 7. Sesame Street has actually slowed down and went from the non-sequitur educational clip show that it was when I was growing up to its more narrative format now. This change was to shift the target age down from 4 to 3, since younger kids were now watching tv. But even "slowed down" in Elmos's World (which was CREATED for toddlers), this seemed really fast. While Sesame Street has documented school readiness outcomes (largely the three R's, e.g., Wright et al., 2001), I think they fall short on creating organized thematic knowledge in science. It is perhaps a first exposure to an area, but not interactive nor well-organized in terms of its presentation. It is entirely passive. Watching this really made me miss Mister Rogers. His show left time for children's responses and he presented the theme of the day in an organized fashion, where knowledge was built up slowly for the children to digest.

The plus side, is that my son now wants to go to a Natural History Museum to learn more!