Happy Sunday! I am heading back to Halifax tomorrow for the week to continue on with curriculum work. While I am gone, my class will be working on lots of activities from my Earth Day activity pack. The pack includes 10 different activities appropriate for grades primary and one, ready to print and go! You can check it out in my TpT store by clicking any of the images below.
We have had a busy couple of weeks in my classroom! In fact, due to circumstances beyond our control and a couple of school-wide activities, it took us two weeks to get through what I had planned to accomplish in a week. Oops! So, we have only had time to discuss our first and third big questions. We will continue on with question number two and our writing project to answer number three when I head back to school next week.
To start out our dinosaur exploration, I arrived at school with a giant papier mâché egg. I got this idea from Deanna Jump’s dinosaur unit. This worked out really well timing-wise, because the Easter Bunny had just visited us ;) We talked about making inferences and used a recording sheet to record our ideas of what could be inside due to the egg’s appearance. The recording sheet will be included in my dinosaur unit when it is all ready to go! After our initial inferences, I gave my students three clues, and then we made another inference and talked about how some of our guesses changed. We also had to talk a little bit about checking whether our inferences made sense… yes, the egg was white, but are polar bears oviparous?! While they were outside for recess, the egg hatched… and we drew a final picture of what was inside:
We filled out our Tableau SVA with what we already knew and wanted to
know about dinosaurs and read our first book. Then we added a few things
we learned.
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| Please excuse my printing/spelling/grammar… you have to write quickly when 15 kids are excitedly sharing their knowledge!! |
Here is a reminder of our first big exploration question:
1. Comment est-ce que les différents outils peuvent nous aider à…
- Faire des découvertes
- Résoudre les problèmes
- Changer l’apparence/la texture des substances?
We used tools a LOT throughout the week to make discoveries, solve problems, and change the appearance and texture of objects. First, we discussed paleontologists, what their jobs are, and the tools they use while working. I wrote a little song to help us remember. It will be included in my dinosaur unit, but HERE is a freebie Google doc version of the words. It goes to the tune of “Itsy Bitsy Spider”.
Our first activity was one of the best activities I have done in my (short) teaching career! I made dinosaur eggs out of baking soda and enough water to make dough. I put a little dollar store dinosaur in the centre of each egg. I forgot to take a picture of the eggs when they were whole, but they were really great – a perfect weight and texture for convincing dino eggs. I placed them on a cookie sheet with a whole assortment of tools – paintbrushes, magnifying glasses, Q-tips, plastic knives and spoons, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, plastic tweezers, etc… along with an eye dropper and a little cup of vinegar. I told them nothing except to try whatever tools they liked to hatch the egg, and to remember to be a good partner (we did this in groups of 2-3). It only took about 5 minutes for the first group to get their dinosaur out (using the knife and spoon like a chisel). Their dinosaur was still covered in “egg”, so they decided to drop it into the “water” (I hadn’t told them what was in the cup) to wash it off. Well!!! The screams of excitement when the “water” exploded were just magical! Everyone was so excited and started immediately trying to make theirs explode, some using the eye dropper and some just dumping it all in the cup. This turned the solid eggs into goo, changing their appearance, and solved the problem of getting the dinosaurs out of the eggs and cleaning the dinos off. My students also discovered that what was in the cup was not in fact water. It was a super fun experiment and I HIGHLY recommend it!
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| Just look at that joy and excitement! |
We used a recording sheet to record our observations and share which tool worked best.
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| Love when they change the worksheet to make it grammatically correct for their answer haha |
Another activity we did to practice using tools also came from Deanna Jump’s dinosaur unit. We did a chocolate chip cookie excavation! Each child received a cookie, two plastic knifes, and a paintbrush and had to carefully extract all the chocolate chips from their cookie and count them. We have focused a lot on counting strategies this year and I was pleased to see them being used reflexively!
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| My little paleontologists all ready to go! |
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We also did some adorable diplodocus directed drawings for art. I love directed drawing! My class loves to paint, so we trace our drawings with black crayon and use disk paints to paint them. I love how even though every child gets the same instructions, they all turn out so differently. Here is the pin where I found the directions, but when I tried to open it, the page could not be found, so I just used the instructions right on the pin.
Enjoy your week!
Hi Andrea! I just saw this post from Pinterest and just realized that its from 2015. but I was wondering if you had a link to your dinosaur unit. I love this activity and would love to have the recording sheet!