Year 2 Classes at Great Wood Primary Explore Dinosaurs

Last month, we visited Great Wood Primary in Lancashire to work with the two classes of Year 2 to help them explore dinosaurs and fossils as part of their term topic entitled “Dinosaur Hunters”.  Our thanks to the talented teaching team Mrs Parkin, Mrs Coulthard, Mrs Stroud and Miss Nicholson for their assistance on the day.

Dinosaur Hunters

A special thank you to Mrs Norman for helping to put the gym mats away once the two dinosaur workshops had concluded.  An extension idea we suggested was to challenge the children to “design their own prehistoric animal” and we received last week a set of beautiful and very creative dinosaur designs.  We loved looking all the different animals and reading the labels that the children had carefully added to their drawings.

A Very Colourful Display of Dinosaur Designs by Year 2 Children

A selection of prehistoric animal designs by a Year 2 class at Great Wood Primary.

Picture credit: Great Wood Primary School

One of the Wonderful Dinosaur Designs (Great Labelling by Great Wood Primary)

Blake_o_saurus by Blake. An extension activity after a dinosaur workshop.

Picture credit: Great Wood Primary School (Blake)

Some very impressive labelling of the dinosaur’s body parts by Blake (Mrs Parkin’s class).

Aidan Designed a Long-Necked Dinosaur with a Sharp Nose Horn

Aidan (Year 2) designed a long-necked dinosaur.

Picture credit: Great Wood Primary School (Aidan)

Creative Dinosaur Designs

Challenging the class to design their own prehistoric animal is a great way to help reinforce learning.  Labelling of the various body parts helps a child to develop their vocabulary as well as exploring ideas about what the dinosaur might have eaten, its colour and where it might have lived – this leads on to exploring simple food chains and animal adaptations.

Both classes of Year 2 children wrote letters and these were kindly sent into Everything Dinosaur by the teaching team.  An extension activity such as writing a thank you letter gives the children the opportunity to practice their handwriting and there were certainly some splendid letters sent into us.  The letters and drawings have been posted up on one of the walls in our warehouse.

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s website: Everything Dinosaur.

A Lovely Letter Sent in by Hannah

A thank you letter sent in by Hannah to Everything Dinosaur.

Picture credit: Great Wood Primary School (Hannah)

Studying Stegosaurus

Hannah and her class mates certainly seemed to have enjoyed the dinosaur workshop.  She asked how many years did a Stegosaurus live?  That’s a fascinating question and palaeontologists have been able to use the fossilised bones of dinosaurs to work out how old some dinosaurs were when they died and how quickly they grew.  The most famous Stegosaurus fossils come from the United States and these fossils are more than 145 million years old.   It is likely that some stegosaurs could live for perhaps as long as twenty years.

For models and replicas of Stegosaurus and other prehistoric animals: Papo Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animal Models.

A Letter from Charlie

Charlie wrote that he now knew that birds are related to dinosaurs.

Picture credit: Great Wood Primary School (Charlie)

A very big thank you to both classes of Year 2 at Great Wood Primary, we are sorry that we can’t answer all the questions but we will post up more examples of the children’s work on our social media pages and email the school to say thank you for sending them all into our offices.   As we post up the letters and drawings it will help to remind us about the fun we had delivering the dinosaur workshop for Year 2.

For further information about Everything Dinosaur’s work in schools: Contact Everything Dinosaur