Inspiring Kids To Do Research

As you all know, we’re having Dinosaur-themed activities this week. This curriculum is basically for Vito but most of the time, Mavi wants to take part in it as well, especially when the topic is interesting to him. And since Mavi loves dinosaurs, I gave him some tasks last Monday (holiday in Ireland).

Mavi is almost 8 years old, and I have already exhausted all dinosaur-related activities for him.

For an almost 8 year old, I gave him some tasks involving research using his books. I believe that "research" is an important skill that an elementary child needs to develop. Mavi asked me “what’s research Mom?”. I explained that it’s like investigating, looking for answers, gathering information, recording, etc. We are starting with books, but I’ll teach him later on on how to do this using Google.

Now, I made this FREE Dinosaur worksheet a long time ago and we used it again for his research. The task here is for him to fill-up the worksheet with information that answer the questions in the worksheet.

For his references we have these books at home which Mavi really love:

Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life
First Dinosaur Picture Atlas (I love that it is presented with maps!)
National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs (His favourite!)

I told him that there are times, the information you are looking for cannot be found in one book, so you need more resources in order to gather the right answers.

Did he enjoy this activity? Yes, definitely! I think for now it’s because he worked on dinosaurs which is his current obsession. So I highly suggest that if you want to try this to your child, pick a topic that he’s interested in. This is quite challenging for his age but as they always say, start them young!

Hope that I’ll be able to come up with more interesting research topics this summer.

If you are looking for more DINOSAUR BASED ACTIVITIES why not check our other posts below: