How long were the dinosaurs?

While I'm posting about my dinosaur unit, I might as well share this too!

In my previous post, I mentioned that I did a short dinosaur unit two summers ago with 3 and 4 year olds. At the time I was really trying to figure out good math activities to do that were fun (as it was the summer program) as well as educational. Here's what I came up with:

I decided that it may interest my students to see how long a dinosaur was. And what is every child's favorite dinosaur? A t-rex, of course! So, I researched how long a t-rex was (note: dinosaurs are not measured by their height because they walked hunched over: they are measured from head to tail) and discovered they were up to 40 feet long.

My classroom was not 40 feet long, so I decided to do my lesson out on the playground. I used a long extension cord and measured forty feet with my students (with a tape measure), stretching it out across the playground. Then I used some receipt paper (that came in a large roll) and used it to measure the heights of my students as well as myself. They loved being measured and then being able to hold the piece of paper that was the same size they were. We placed all of our paper heights on top of the extension cord one next to the other and found that all of our combined heights did not even come close to the length of the t-rex.

There were mixed reactions to this activity. My four year olds LOVED it. They were all really interested in dinosaurs and thought it was sooo cool that our heights didn't reach the end of the dinosaur height. My three year olds were not so thrilled. They were too distracted by the fact that we were on the playground, and they didn't really care about their height. So, I would definitely do this again with ages four and up. With younger students, the teacher mostly does all the work, but with older students, they can do the measuring and comparing. I would say this activity could go up to third or fourth grade and still keep the interests of students. If you do not have enough space to do a forty foot dinosaur, you can measure feet compared to a dinosaur foot instead.

Happy Measuring!