Deb Pulls together a Dino Program!

Deb and I had scheduled a week away from home from Friday, June 5 to Saturday, June 13. The plan was that we would spend the first weekend in Meadville, PA (in the upper left-hand corner of the state) while I went to my spiritual healing school -- an institution about which I will blog about sometime soon -- and then drive to West Virginia.

In West Virginia, we would present eight separate dinosaur lectures -- one at each branch of the Kanawha County Public Library System, doing two lectures a day from Tuesday through Friday.

The conditions in West Virginia were wonderful! Our hotel in downtown Charleston overlooked the Kanawha River, which allowed us to watch the coal barges proceed rather majestically downstream -- morning to night. The local restaurants were quite nice -- and two of them were downright superb. The libraries themselves were in excellent shape and seemed to have all the investment money they could have wanted. The kids were great -- and the moms, dads, grammas and grandads were delighted to have us there.

Now the normal show for us goes this way: Randy does a half-hour "slide show" about the fossilization process, finding and extracting bones, why you can't find dinosaurs in your back yard (especially in West Virginia, where all the rocks are the wrong age!), and hiking through the badlands. That kind of stuff.

Then the second half of the show has all the kids sitting in a circle on the floor as we hand around actual dinosaur fossil material and ask (and answer!) questions about what we're seeing.

And Deb's job for the West Virginia part of the trip was going to be as companion, navigator, and assistant in setting up, taking down and carrying stuff. (But more was in the works for her!!)

At each library branch, numerous kids would show up early to get the best possible seat for the dinosaur show. If the show was scheduled to get underway at 1:30 PM, we would have kids pacing like caged Dromeosaurs outside the lecture room by 1:00. Not fair.

Now, I didn't have anything to show them yet as the laptop computer, digital projector, screen, PA system, etc., were still being set up. So what could we do?

Here's what we did! We set up a large table for Deb at the back of the lecture room with maybe 15 or 20 items in the middle plus two pieces of paper -- one on each corner of the table. Written on one piece of paper were the words "Dinosaur Bones" and written on the other piece were the words "Just Plain Old Rocks." Roughly half of the items on the table were, in fact, scrap pieces of dinosaur fossil. And the rest were rocks. (Plus a piece of local coal we found by the railyard.)

So now we could invite the kids to come as early as they liked into the lecture room and cluster around Deb and her table, as I finished setting up the "formal" part of the program. Deb would ask one of the kids to pick up any one of the objects, determine if it was a dinsosaur bone or a rock, then place it on the appropriately labeled piece of paper. And they were almost always correct! When it seemed appropriate, Deb would ask the child, "Okay, you got it right, but what was it about the object that made you think it as a bone? (or rock, if that was the case)?

Deb would keep this going until it was time to start the "official" start of the program. And after the "official" program was over, kids would drift back to Deb's table and go over the pieces again. And ask more questions. And make more observations.

Oh yes, and I should mention that most of the really attentive kids at these presentations were girls. So having Deb run the "Is It a Rock or a Bone?" table probably made it that much easier for the girls to cluster 'round and ask questions of such a knowledgeable and pleasant person. A person who clearly understood her subject!! (And did moms and dads enjoy watching their little girls immerse themselves in a subject normally relegated to 10-year-old boys? Oh, yes they did!!)

So this approach not only resolved the "caged Dromeosaur" issue, and extended the program by 20 or 30 minutes, but it also allowed each child the chance to answer for him or herself what is usually the most important question that they bring to such a program: "How do I know it's really a dinosaur bone?" After working with Deb for 5 minutes, they felt comfortable that they knew the answer -- because Deb allowed them the room to figure it out for themselves.