Dinosaurs

This week we had the opportunity to explore a new unit, with the children’s interests specifically in mind. In order to assure what topic they wanted to learn more about we took a class vote last week and the winner was Dinosaurs! So, that is what we learned all about.  

We mainly focused on five different types of dinosaurs: triceratops, brachiosaurus, apatosaurus, stegosaurus, and tyrannosaurus rex. We learned so many different facts about each dinosaur. We learned some dinosaurs were plant eaters, some were meat eaters and how they were able to protect themselves from their predators, plus so much more! 

For a fun math activity we printed out a giant triceratops footprint from Here. How many of our feet can fit into one footprint? We placed our shoes in the footprint, 10 pairs of shoes were able to fit inside the footprint. So big! How many unifix cubes long? We counted out that it was 36 unifix cubes. We had so much fun measuring and counting. 

We also learned that there are special scientists that study dinosaur fossils and bones. They are called paleontologists. We pretended to be paleontologists in our very own classroom, in the sand table. Would we be able to find any dinosaur bones or fossils? Earlier in the week we made our own unique dinosaur bones with salt dough. We added them to our sand table. We were very careful, using paint brushes to dust off the sand, to conduct our own dino dig.

Additionally, when learning about fossils we made our own fossil sugar cookies. We used a toy dinosaur to create the footprint. They looked just like real fossils, except these one tasted yummy!  

As an art project we created dinosaur footprint pictures.

Also, at the end of the week we illustrated our favorite dinosaur that we learned about and then labeled the picture. Each child then dictated one fact that they learned about the dinosaur.

Moreover, our neighbors 3E invited us over. One of their student’s grandparents is a cartoonist and he showed us what he can draw and how he draws it. Believe it or not he even illustrated for us a dinosaur scene!