Although we have taken quite a big break from using the weebly, we are back!! The past few months got the best of me and kept me quite busy so our weebly unfortunately was what came off my plate. However, I wanted to share some pictures from our recent fossils unit! The kiddos became paleontologist for two days and went on quite a few 'digs'. Our first dig was outside and involved the kiddos using their tools to dig up ancient dinosaur bones! Once the team worked together to dig up the bones (no hands allowed), they had to assemble the bone pieces into the dinosaur! We then grabbed our scientific notebooks and studied the dinosaur bones to draw conclusions about that dinosaur (what they ate, if they flew, length of certain body parts). The kids had a BLAST! Check out pictures below!
We started off our fossil time today by discussing the difficulties paleontologists might endure during one of their digs. We talked about the different tools that might be helpful, the fact paleontologists can't lift the rock they are working with to get a better angle to dig out bones, as well as how it may be easier to dig something out of a sand than rock. I told the kiddos that they would be paleontologists yet again today and this time, they had to extract fossils from a rock! We talked about what the word extract meant, about cleaning off their fossils once they were extracted, and about how rushing through an extraction could result in chipped fossils! The kiddos were each given a cookie that acted as their rock. The task? Extract as many fossils (chocolate chip cookies) using your tool (toothpick) as possible! We stopped every 2 minutes and recorded our data (chipped fossils, how many fossils we could extract, how many tools we broke that round...). The kiddos did this for 8 minutes! During the last two minutes, I gave the kiddos an extra toothpick to help steady the cookie as they dug out the chocolate chips! The kiddos had great conversations about how much more difficult this task was then they thought it would be. They didn't like that they had to rely on the tool instead of their hands :) Check out our pictures below!