How Do Dinosaurs Protect Themselves?

Today was a crazy fun day in our homeschool. We’re in the middle of a Dinosaur Unit Study with the kids, and are having SO much fun!

How Do Dinosaurs Protect Themselves?

Today, we learned how dinosaurs protect themselves with their armor, spikes and other physical traits. This week, I had the boys learning more about herbivores and carnivores. They discussed how some dinosaurs were natural predators, and some of the herbivores were more vulnerable than others.

Two very scary dinosaurs- wearing the hats they made with Mother Goose Time this week

The kids are very familiar with medieval armor because of the time we spent in Europe, so it didn’t take much explaining to help them understand how the dinosaurs scales and armored plates (in some cases) could protect them from the teeth of larger dinosaurs.

We also discussed how some dinosaurs had horns, spikes along their bodies, and sometimes on their tails, which they could swing and use as weapons for defense.

Learn More About Armored Dinosaurs

We used these resources to beef up our study of armored dinosaurs:

Enchanted Learning has a whole section on armored dinosaurs, with links to learn more about individual species.

Watch Walking With Dinosaurs (which is awesome), but at the least, check out this small clip that shows one armored dinosaur in action.

For older kids, this dinosaur directory has a huge amount of information on every species.

Make Your Own Dinosaur Armor

This is one of my favorite Mother Goose Time activities ever. For this lesson, I grabbed a bunch of supplies for the kids (mostly card stock, card board, and packaging tape- although you can really use anything that sounds good) and let them take some time to build their own dinosaur armor.

They worked really well together and discussed what parts of their bodies they thought would need the most protection if they were dinosaurs. They used the cardboard to make plates, and the paper to add spikes and other details.