Dinosaur Detectives at St Joseph’s RC Primary
Year 1 at St Joseph’s RC Primary had the opportunity to become “dinosaur detectives” on Wednesday afternoon as a team member from Everything Dinosaur joined their class to conduct a dinosaur workshop in their school. The afternoon session was split into two parts. Firstly, the children joined our dinosaur expert in the hall for a tactile exploration of fossils and all things dinosaur. One of the key learning objectives as outlined by Miss Stanton (class teacher), was to encourage the children with their writing and vocabulary development.
The Size and Scale of Dinosaurs
The focus was on thinking of adjectives to help describe the different dinosaurs and to express just how big some of them were. The lesson plan we had prepared dove-tailed nicely into the scheme of work the children had been undertaking in the morning. There were some wonderful examples of great use of adjectives to describe Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex in the children’s work books.
Dinosaurs Help Children Develop Their Vocabulary
Children gain confidence using adjectives.
Picture credit: St Joseph’s RC Primary School/Everything Dinosaur
The children had lots of questions about dinosaurs, we were even asked about pterosaurs, so once we returned to the office we were able to send over some images of flying reptiles to help the teaching team explain what these animals looked like. In addition, we were asked “which dinosaur is best?” What a super question! Rather than have our dinosaur expert answer it, we challenged the class to hold their own “dinosaur beauty contest” and vote for their favourite.
Dinosaur Detectives
We emailed over a set of six different dinosaur scale drawings and we put a special fact on each drawing about that specific prehistoric animal. We then challenged Miss Stanton and her enthusiastic teaching assistant Mrs Sheikh, to get each child to pick their own personal favourite. Could the children create a table to display the results? What about making a line graph to show the voting preferences?
Microraptor – One of the Dinosaurs Chosen for the Classroom Vote
A great way to introduce things like tally counts and line graphs.
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur
The second part of the dinosaur workshop was located in the classroom. We showed the children several fossil teeth and then we got them to measure various dinosaur footprints and to compare the size of dinosaur’s feet to their own hands. Lots of measuring cubes were used in this exercise and the children added and subtracted to work out how many one centimetre cubes bigger/smaller their own hands were when compared to the footprints.
A Dinosaur Themed Term Topic
This is the first time that the teaching team responsible for Year 1 have introduced a dinosaur themed term topic. The children were really enthusiastic and keen to learn about prehistoric animals. As a topic it is proving flexible enough to fit in with the demands of the new curriculum.
To learn more about Everything Dinosaur’s extensive product range: Email the team at Everything Dinosaur.
A Colourful Dinosaur Theme “Wow” Wall
A colourful dinosaur themed display.
Picture credit: St Joseph’s RC Primary School/Everything Dinosaur
All to soon it was time to prepare for the end of the school day, but we did promise the children that when we got back to the Everything Dinosaur office we would email over additional teaching resources to help Miss Stanton, Mrs Sheikh and Year 1 to continue their “Dinosaur Detectives” topic.
To view the extensive range of educational, teaching resources available from Everything Dinosaur: Dinosaur Teaching Resources and Gifts.
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