Investigating Dinosaurs

We have continued to investigate dinosaurs further as the children seem to be really interested in this topic. We were very privileged to borrow some dinosaur bone replicas from Mrs Young, the Head of Science.

 

     
The children have been taking photographs with the iPad and digital camera.

Some children have drawn their observations.

We also used books and the iPad to try and identify what kind of dinosaurs these bones were from.

The children were very interested in the photograph taking process and loved taking pictures if each other and the environment as well. 

This week Oliver brought some fun dinosaur toys that grow in water. We put some in eater to observe. The children were delighted to play with the dinosaurs in the water. 

So we set the growing ones aside to let them grow and added some of our sorting dinosaurs to the water as well. We then set up a dry area with some dinosaurs as well. Conversations emerge that prompt the children to begin observing and classifying. 

Teacher: which ones swim? 

Michael pointed to the ones with fins and said "these ones because they have things that help them swim."

 Teacher: what do these dinosaurs have? Jacob: "Feet." 

Eventually all the dinosaurs went swimming! 

Then  Henry asked, "what kind of dinosaur is this?" The teacher grabbed an iPad and we began looking up dinosaurs to find out what kind of dinosaurs we were playing with. The teacher asks the boys to describe what the dinosaur looks like so she can find out what kind it is. Henry said "it has a long neck and fins." The boys went through each dinosaur, describing it's features and the teacher wrote their descriptions in the search engine in the iPad.

 They compared images until a match was found. Jacob said, "I found a bone at home. I thought it was a dog bone, but it's a dinosaur bone! It's from the museum." A brief discussion then developed about museums and what things had been seen at museums.

Perhaps we could create a museum in our classroom....