Redeemer Lutheran Church Preschool students are now equipped to discover ancient bones in Minnesota, with the paleontologists-in-training spending a week at the school’s annual dinosaur camp.

Preschool teacher and director Heidi Braun created and organized the camp for her students and said the results have been well worth the work.

“They love it,” Braun said. “I’ve had a lot of good feedback.”

The preschool’s playground was transformed into a pre-historic land with a dinosaur nest and a fossil digging area, where students could construct a model of a dinosaur using their findings.

Inside the classroom, the students sang songs, read stories and created their own fossils or noodle-art projects of the extinct creatures.

On Thursday, Deb Ahlquist with the Minnesota Children’s Museum in St. Paul brought their traveling classroom to the church with hands-on activities and games.

Ahlquist said the dinosaur class is their most popular traveling class, and in her experience, the hands-on activities provide the perfect learning environment for a student of any age.

“It’s just the best way we learn,” Ahlquist said.

Braun agreed, citing the camp’s activities as an example of mindful play for her students.

“That helps them remember it, and it keeps them engaged,” Braun said.

Ahlquist taught the eager preschoolers how to tell the difference between herbivores and carnivores — interjected with the students’ own expertise, of course — before walking them through a dig in North Dakota where a triceratops horn was discovered and donated to the museum.

Students had the opportunity to touch and nearly hold the fossil and learn about how to distinguish fossils in what they discover.

Ahlquist then let the preschool students loose in groups on digging, identifying and measuring stations, which featured a game pitting the herbivores against the carnivores.

If Braun needed more validation of the success of her camp, the smiles on her student’s faces as they sifted through the sand for “dinosaur bones” or measured a T-Rex’s stride length were more than enough.