Year 2/3 Children Design Dinosaurs
Dinosaur Designs
As 2016 draws to a close, team members at Everything Dinosaur can reflect on all the teaching work that they have carried out over the last twelve months. Our work in schools may be just about finished for the year, but we are still responding to emails and phone calls from teachers advising them on next term’s dinosaur topic.
Schoolchildren Design Dinosaurs
The teaching itinerary may be completely full for the Spring Term, next week will see us sending out emails to schools to finalise the arrangements for January’s teaching dates, but we are still supporting those schools and classes that we visited in November, helping the teaching team to maximise the benefits from one of our dinosaur workshops in school.
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A Thank You Letter from Cyprian
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur
Thank You Letters
Take for example, one of our recent visits to work with a mixed class of Year 2/3 children. During our dinosaur and fossil themed workshop, we set the class a number of our “pinkie palaeontologist” challenges. We asked the children to send us a thank you letter. This provides the teacher with a great opportunity to introduce a dinosaur-themed writing exercise.
The picture above shows one such thank you letter, sent into Everything Dinosaur from Cyprian. If the children had questions that we had not been able to answer during our morning of dinosaur and prehistoric animal themed teaching activities, we suggested that they might want to include the question within their letter.
This gives the teaching team the opportunity to check appropriate use of grammar and punctuation. It also provides a wonderful opportunity for the children to practice their cursive hand-writing, a key requirement of the English element of the national curriculum for this age group.
A Dinosaur Design by Lois
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur
Designing Dinosaurs
During the workshop with this mixed class of Year 2/3 children, we asked the class to have a go at designing their very own dinosaur. This permitted us to help reinforce the teacher’s scheme of work which included reference to simple food chains, habitats and the idea of extinction events. Cyprian designed a “Cypyensores”, whilst Lois, one of his classmates, opted to produce a green, plant-eating dinosaur, with lots of lovely labels to help describe this dinosaur and to indicate what it might have needed to survive if this dinosaur had lived millions of years ago.
The class teacher commented:
“Thank you so much for coming to visit us on Friday, I really hope you enjoyed your time at our school. All of the children really enjoyed meeting you and learning some amazing information about the dinosaurs. It was a great discussion point for my class, which carried on until home time!”
To enquire about Everything Dinosaur’s outreach work: Email Everything Dinosaur.