Our theme this half term has been 'TIme Travellers', we have travelled all the way back in time to the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous period to learn all about dinosaurs.
Herbivores or carnivores?
We have really enjoyed learning all about the different types of dinosaurs and their unusual names. Paleontologists have sorted dinosaurs into lots of different groups, they have used different criteria for their groups such as their hip joints and skull shape. We decided to sort our dinosaurs based on their diet. We learnt that some dinosaurs only eat meat and these are called carnivores, some only eat plants and these are called herbivores and some eat both meat and plants which are called omnnivores. We sorted images of dinosaurs into the correct groups. Once we had done this we decided our own criteria to sort different types of dinosaurs. Some of us sorted them by their height, their number of claws or their tail length.
fossils
Scientists have found fossils all over the world. Fossils are formed over thousands of years. Once an animal has died it's bones can become squashed under layers and layers of earth, rocks and clay which turns the bone into a type of rock which we call a fossil. We used clay to make fossil imprints using shells and dinosaur figures. It was a lot of fun.
Our saltopus experiment
A Saltopus was a small carnivore that lived in the late Triassic period. It ate insects and small animals. We created our own Saltopus paintings using a science experiment to create a texture for his skin. We drew our Saltopus and then painted it with watery paint. Once we had done this, we sprinkled salt crystals all over our picture, we then waited for it to dry. When our pictures had dried we scraped off the salt to see what had happened. The salt had left light and dark patches all over our dinosaur. We found out that this is because salt absorbs water, this meant that the paint was very dark around all of the salt crystals and lighter else where because the salt had pulled all the watery paint towards it.
How big was a triceratops footprint?
We worked in groups to put together pices of a puzzle to create a life size Triceratops footprint. Once we had finnished we measured and recorded it's length and width. We compared our own feet with the Triceratops' foot, our feet looked tiny!
DIno animations
We used the ipads to create animations using dinosaur figures. We realised that each time you move the dinosaurs to take the next picture they only had to move a very tiny bit. We decided that our animations looked even better if we had something in the background of our shot that didn't move. We worked in pairs and took it in turns to be the person altering the set or the photographer. Our animations looked great when we had finnished!
What's your favourite dinosaur?
We have been learning about data handling in school this half term. We have spent some time learning how to gather and read informtion in a bar chart. In our groups we made bar charts about things we are interested in. Lots of us choose to make graphs about our favourite dinosaurs. We filled in our bar charts using information we gathered from other members of the class. The Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Spinodon were very popular.