Do you ever wonder what Covid has taught you? Well, it has taught me to quit rushing. We learned about dinosaurs for five weeks, and of course we’ll never be quite finished. Our last week with the dinosaurs and fossils captured the attention of almost all of the Honeybees.
I created a Paleontology work station for each of them, and we found sharks teeth, bones, coral, and shells. Once they saw what they were looking for they were sharp eyed paleontologists.
All of these materials are from the Aurora Fossil Museum in North Carolina, and I’ve been sharing this experience with my class and other classes for many years. Our class quickly discovered that they could find and match fossils in their tray to the identification guide.
I love the way that this project spoke their language, and I think we can spend one more morning trying this again.
Earlier in our dinosaur exploration I had done a dinosaur fossil demo with some plastic dinosaurs, dirt, sand, and water, and we talked through dinosaur extinction with hand motions to create the passage of millions of years, water, and pressure. When we made our own fossils with clay, the kids revisited the hand motions we had done several weeks earlier.
Our fossils are almost dry and can go home soon. Check back through instagram to see the slab of air dry clay that refused to stay down. It sprouted live fern limbs and became a dinosaur robot.
