St Joseph and St Bede R. C. Primary Explore Dinosaurs
As a term topic, studying dinosaurs at Key Stage 1 lends itself to all kinds of imaginative and creative learning activities. The teaching team for Year 2 at St Joseph and St Bede R. C. Primary school have provided an example of this with an extension activity organised in co-operation with Everything Dinosaur team members following our visit to the school.
Dinosaur Workshop
During the dinosaur workshop we explained that as far as we know, all dinosaurs hatched from eggs. Working in collaboration with the Year 2 teachers, we pretended to have left behind some dinosaur eggs after we had finished packing up our fossils and other equipment. The children wrote informing us about the eggs (helpful exercise regarding sentence construction, spelling, format of letter and so forth), we agreed that it would be a good idea if they looked after the eggs for us.
Disaster has struck! Earlier this week the children discovered that an egg had hatched and that the baby dinosaur had disappeared. The pupils then created their own comic strips all about their “Dinosaur Disaster”.
Dinosaur Disaster at Primary School
Picture credit: Year 2 St Joseph and St Bede Primary School
This is a great example of an extension activity. The children are encouraged to investigate, explore ideas and to use different media to tell a story. We suspect that the school’s baby dinosaur is going to have lots of adventures and thanks to photoshop, it is going to turn up in some amazing parts of the world. Postcards sent to the school by the dinosaur will then act as a catalyst to introduce other subject areas into the scheme of work.
Visit Everything Dinosaur’s user friendly website: Visit Everything Dinosaur.