How Big Is A Dinosaur?


Our study of fossils has led us to some great conversations about dinosaurs. The class had a lot of questions, "when were they alive?", "how did they die?", "what did they eat?", and "how big were they?" We set out reading books to help answer some of our questions. We read the book "How Big We're The Dinosaurs" by Bernard Most


After reading the book we had a conversation about measurement. One of our friends told us, "we measure things to find out how big something is". We decided to measure ourselves. "How many blocks tall are you?" We talked about what the word "prediction" means. The children made predictions and then we decided to test them out. After everyone was measured with blocks we got out our measuring tapes and talked about the words "inches" and "feet".


We then wanted to find out how long a T-Rex's foot was.
We found out that it was 3 feet long!  "How long is 3 feet?", we wanted to find out. We used our measuring tapes first and then everyone wanted to know how many blocks and how many of our own feet that would be.


We then drew a T-Rex's foot to scale and cut it out. We predicted how many shoes would fit inside. Titus guessed 31' Megan 20 and Scarlett 30. We worked together and when not one more shoe would fit we started to count. 22 shoes fit inside the foot of a T-Rex !


When we were finished some of the class decided to decorate the enormous foot.

Popular posts from this blog

Insect Compositions

Image
We often use loose material compositions in our classroom as a way for children to tell us what they know. We set out various materials, stones, gems, paper and sticks. These representations are not permanent.  We take a picture and then the material gets sorted back and the activity is ready for the next child.
Read more

Summer Art Show

Image
This summer has been an incredible journey into the world of art. It started with a family trip to the Harn museum that inspired explorations into color,lines and shapes, which led to the discovery of different mediums and techniques.We read books about famous artists like, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jackson Pollack. Somewhere around mid summer we provoked the idea of finding a way to show our art to our families .We talked about our trip to the museum and the children were excited to make an "art show" for their parents and friends. Our art show was a huge success.  We documented the work that the children did with the intention of making our summer visible to our parents. This type of documentation lets those not in our classroom day to day understand our path; where we started and why and how we ended up where we did. Our art show was not only an opportunity to show off our beautiful  works of creativity, it was also a way to sho
Read more

Painting Storm Clouds

Image
We learned there are different types of clouds, and that not all clouds bring rain. We can tell the weather by the kinds of clouds that are in the sky. Storm clouds are called cumulonimbus. They are tall, puffy and grey. They bring the rain. We invited the children to paint storm clouds. They turned out beautiful! Look for the them in our work room to the left of our back door.
Read more