Jack's Book o Dinosaurs

A few weeks ago, I found these odd little puzzles -- 3-D dinosaur bones. They were made by slave labour in China, and so only a dollar. I was embarrassed to do so, but I bought them anyway.

Jack and I poked around with them one evening -- and I eventually declared that this looked like a Dad project.

In the meanwhile, Jack and I worked on a Mamma project. We made a lapbook in which to record everything Jack knows about dinosaurs. We expect it will take a long time to get it all down -- and Jack thinks we might need another book to finish it all. (He may be right.)

Since the puzzle he and Dad worked on was a Dimetrodon, Jack dug out his Dimetrodon model to compare it to the skeleton.

The puzzle is slightly bigger, but we were able to see what bones did what. (And Mamma has her doubts about the anatomical verity of this puzzle.)

We took photos and and pasted them into the lap book, and then Jack narrated everything he could think of about Dimetrodon. (Jack had to help me spell the dinosaur names correctly. He looked them up and dictated the spelling while I wrote.)

And then we were on a roll...so we did Stegosaurus, too!

It was interesting to watch Jack read his book. I wrote down exactly what he said in most cases (a few times he took so long to get it out that I figured out what he meant and suggested an alternative phrasing - - and then wrote down whichever he chose. He rushed off to read it to Dad and I was fascinated by his reaction as he came to the phrases that didn't make sense the way he had phrased them. He stumbled over them, paused and said "Hmmmm. We'll have to rewrite this one", said it in a clearer way, and went happily on! I was so pleased that he neither ignored an imperfection, nor let it dim his joy in his creation!