I totally get what you're saying but I've found great books lists through googling unit studies which saves me time. I then look them up at AMazon to get a rating, then I check to see if our library has it. It does take leg work.

Here's a link to a thread of dinosaur unit studies. http://afterschoolers.yuku.com/topic/1953?page=2

You can get LEGO MINDSTORMS at Toys R Us. You can buy it online. Look for sales or coupons. Sometimes FAO Schwarz has a good sale on them. We own two kits. One time Target (maybe Christmas) had some in the store. I did buy my online from Target and there was a coupon and I got free shipping so check that first.

Your first resource for robotics is http://www.thenxtstep.blogspot.com/. There is a forum where you can post questions and folk will answer. I'm LEGOmom at that site. There is a fun Mars Mission challenge starting now that I think we will do this summer. It's similar to First LEGO League but you can do it alone rather than having a team and you do it all at home. I find this is great for our asynchronous kids. I was shocked that DS then 7yrs old took to programming like a duck to water. His science fair project was to ask the question "Does hot water cool down at the same rate that cold water warms up to room temperature." he used LEGO temp sensors attached to the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT brick. He wrote the program to gather the data, append it to a file, and download it to the computer. DH ten helped him to transfer it to Excel for graphing. DS then interpreted the graph on his own. My FIL said, given it was LEGO products, the temp curves were perfect (it never reaches room temp - asymptote). I was further shocked when my 5yr old started writing his own programs and began debugging them as well. It's a great tool for logical thinking. I own ALL of the LEGO NXT books so if you have your eye on one, I can give you thoughts on it.

I'm not a crafty person hence we never do crafts. I figure that's what I sent them to preK for lol. Things like mummifying a chicken is just VERY COOL!!! those are my types of go-alongs lol.

I also tie in geography whenever possible.

I think this summer we'll do an Olympics unit, tie it in w/ Ancient Greece, do math to chart the medals the countries get and scoring etc.

When we did early peoples, the boys enjoyed the arch dig I setup in the sandbox. That involved marking off quadrants, drawing them on paper, numbering them, labeling items, discussing what they might have been used for, etc.

Most of my unit studies were when my boys were younger than yours is now.

I have a good dino book. I'll look it up. it shows a dino graveyard (actually I think that's the name) and it asks you to come up w/ hypotheses explaining the graveyard. It then goes through and systematically disabuses each one based on the available evidence.