For a short while this year, we began a unit reading and thinking about dinosaurs with our
youngest children during a weekly snack. To begin, we read a lovely book called Dinosaur
Valley about a small Orodromeus family learning to find food and survive the larger meat eating
dinosaurs.  We followed that with Maia about Jack Horner’s discovery of the Maiasaur nests in
Montana, proving that some dinosaurs did care for their babies and remained in protective
herds, migrating with the seasons.  Some weeks we began looking at pictures of dinosaurs and
talked about ways we could group or classify them.  Big and small, meat eater and plant eater,
two legged or four legged.  Slowly we added some other features crested, horned, duck billed,
etc. Next we read a short book on ways we know about dinosaurs through their bones.
We brought in 6 sets of bones, skulls and body bones. As children looked at them in the middle
of the circle, they began to make suggestions about what they might be.