Dinosaurs, Geocaching, Craft and Books

My kids love their dinosaur books. We have a whole book bin full of just dinosaur books.  I like reading the picture books with them and my older son loves exploring the non-fiction encyclopedia style books to learn all their scientific names and facts.

We recently visited Dinosaur Land (otherwise known as Vernal, Utah). It was a perfect time to pull out the books and do a simple dinosaur craft.

We saw this idea at the Natural History Museum in Vernal.  They had one to use at the front desk so my kids asked to make our own at home. 

We made these dinosaur pencils quickly by wrapping a rubber band around the tiny toy dinosaurs.  This was easy enough for my kids to do by themselves. They tried to find matching color rubber bands and pencils. This herd of dinosaurs looks really cool in our homework caddy.  I love that the kids can still take the toys off to play with.

 

Try making some of your own. Just grab a bag of toy dinosaurs, some rubber bands and pencils and band them together.

DINOSAUR BOOKS

Here are a few Dinosaur books my kids like.

(*Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you purchase items from the links below I receive a small percentage of the sale. I always recommend finding books at your library to check them out, then if you’d like to buy them, Amazon is one option. I appreciate any purchases through these links.)

Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs is one my daughter brought home from her school library. It is a fun version by Mo Willems. He is one of our favorite authors lately.  And another vintage favorite from my childhood is Danny and the Dinosuar by Syd Hoff.

GEOCACHING 
Our family has been Geocaching for the past year.  We found a few in Dinosaur Land (Vernal, Utah).  The Utah Field House of Natural History Museum had one of our favorite Geocaches we’ve ever found.  The coordinates led us to a series of clues we needed to find in each exhibit then we took the answers to the front desk for a final clue leading us to the treasure box cache filled with fun Utah souvenirs.

Geocaching Books
My daughter loves the Box Car Children series and #131, The Box that Watch Found, is about them finding a geocache and joining a geocache club then solving the mystery of disappearing geocaches.  Ben and the Geocache Treasure is a great picture book to introduce younger kids to geocaching.

There is an official Geocaching app for phones that will help you locate geocaches around town, but for hiking we decided to get an official satellite based GPS (hand held, not for car dashes) that can be used in areas without phone service.  We plugged it into our computer and downloaded a list of caches from Geocaching.com.  We purchased this Magellan GPS from Amazon. 

Remember to take little prizes or tokens to trade if the geocache has items for that.  We like to leave little Dr. Seuss prizes (erasers, ornaments, pencils and more).  We will share more of our geocaching adventures in the future.
Do any of you geocache or have kids who love dinosaurs?