Foundation Stage Children Explore Dinosaurs

The month of May is always a busy time for Everything Dinosaur team members and May Day itself saw Everything Dinosaur carrying out a morning’s activities with Foundation Stage children at St Elizabeth’s  Primary School.  The children had been learning about dinosaurs and fossils and with the help of their teachers, Mrs Carr and Miss Bailey the budding young palaeontologists had created a “dinosaur museum” in one of the classrooms.

Exploring Dinosaurs

The Dinosaur Museum at the School

Children create their very own dinosaur exhibition.

Children create their very own dinosaur exhibition.

Picture credit: St Elizabeth’s Primary/Everything Dinosaur

The museum was full of lots of drawings and labelling exercises that the children had undertaken, with the help of Mrs Driver and Mrs Wilson (teaching assistants).  The children were keen to demonstrate which dinosaurs were plant-eaters and which ones ate meat.

Everything Dinosaur

As part of Everything Dinosaur’s visit to the school, our dinosaur expert challenged Foundation Stage 2 to create a piece of dinosaur themed writing.  Could they write about their favourite dinosaur?

Perhaps they could include a dinosaur fact,  could they recall something that the dinosaur expert had said to them and then include this in their piece of prose?  In return, Everything Dinosaur’s expert promised (pinkie palaeontologist promise), to email a drawing of an ammonite for the children’s museum along with a fact sheet on these extinct cephalopods for Mrs Carr.

A Promise to Send over Information on Ammonites

A model showing an Ammonite.

A model of an ammonite.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

Learning About Ammonites

Ammonites are members of the Mollusca phylum and they are closely related to the cuttlefish, octopus and squid.  The children learned all about their wiggle-wobbly tentacles and how some ammonites swam and caught fish.

It was a full morning of activities for the children, some of which were only just 4 years of age, but they demonstrated excellent listening skills.  Although, our dinosaur expert was kept very busy, there was still time to take some pictures of the lovely dinosaur models that the children had made.

A Model of a Tyrannosaurus rex Made by the Children

A very fearsome looking dinosaur.

A very fearsome looking dinosaur.

Picture credit: St Elizabeth’s  Primary School/Everything Dinosaur

This dinosaur has some very big teeth and the yoghurt pot eyes look fantastic.  Perhaps the children can think of an appropriate name for their model, how about “Yoghurt-pot-o-saurus”?

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The combination of physical activities, cognitive processes, tactile fossil handling with the extension activity seemed to be very well received by the children and their teachers.