Kingswood Primary Academy Summer School – Its All About Dinosaurs!
The start of the week (Monday) and an Everything Dinosaur team member was dispatched to Northamptonshire to visit Kingswood Primary Academy to help kick-off their summer school with its theme all about dinosaurs. The enthusiastic teaching team have developed a two week summer school with a focus on literacy to help the children (mainly Key Stage 2), to get to grips with composition, transcription and sentence construction.
Dinosaurs Topic
With a topic like dinosaurs, there is certainly a great deal to write about. For example, there are over 1,200 different types of dinosaur (genera) and new fossil discoveries are being made all the time.
The busy morning started with a short assembly which commenced immediately after registration. In the assembly, Mr Bark (class teacher Year 5), outlined what the children would be doing during the course of the day and introduced our dinosaur expert who explained that fossils of prehistoric animals get discovered in the East Midlands of England and he demonstrated that fossils can even be found in the gravel outside of the classrooms.
Dinosaur Summer School
Then it was on with the activities. The children were split into three groups (stegosaurs, brachiosaurs and the Triceratops group) and each group was given the opportunity to participate in a very tactile fossil exploration and dinosaur workshop led by Everything Dinosaur. This session helped to reinforce learning whilst retaining the focus on literacy. The kinaesthetic nature of the dinosaur workshop supported the other two sessions offered over the course of the day. The children were challenged to create a prehistoric animal timeline, jam-packed with lots of information and useful facts researched and prepared by the groups, many of the children demonstrated a surprising amount of knowledge.
A Very Informative Dinosaur Themed Timeline Created by Kingswood Primary Academy Pupils
Lots of facts and dinosaur information.
Picture Credit: Everything Dinosaur/Kingswood Primary Academy
Lots of Prehistoric Animal Themed Writing was Evident
Amazing facts all about prehistoric life and extinct animals including aetosaurs.
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur/Kingswood Primary Academy
Everything Dinosaur at Summer School
Everything Dinosaur had supplied lots of dinosaur and prehistoric animal themed resources to help support the teaching aims and objectives. The lesson plan we devised for our tactile fossil handling and exploration session helped to support the work of the teachers. There were lots of examples of writing on display and some great use of adjectives too.
In addition to supplying the resources for the timeline exercise, our expert, during his dinosaur workshop challenged the children to have a go at designing their very own dinosaur. He used a modern reconstruction of Triceratops (T. horridus) to help inspire the children. There were some amazing creations on display by the end of the afternoon, with names like “beastiesaurus” and “feathersaurus”, with once again, lots of evidence of labelling, independent research, comprehension and sentence construction.
Amazing Dinosaur Designs on Display
Very creative dinosaurs!
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur/Kingswood Primary Academy
Dinosaur Themed Arts and Crafts
For drawing activities, posters and other dinosaur themed arts and crafts: Dinosaur Themed Art Materials, Crafts and Games.
Super labelling on the diagrams and we were really impressed to see that many of the budding young palaeontologists had thought about the animal’s colours, what it might have eaten and how big it may have been. There was just time at the end of the day to answer some of the many questions from the children (and from the teachers too).
The summer school is running for a fortnight and next week our dinosaur expert will return to the school to help out further. For the next visit we are going to try to take each group on a seaside fossil hunt, quite a challenge when you consider how far from the sea Northamptonshire is!
To learn more about Everything Dinosaur’s dinosaur outreach work: Contact Everything Dinosaur.
