Dinosaurs, Rawr!

This week in first grade my little cookie monsters are learning all sorts of neat-o stuff about dinosaurs!  Who doesn't love learning about dinos?  We are integrating science and literacy in a really fun way.  Below are a few of the activities we have done so far this week:



This is our Dinosaur KWL chart we created.  The students lovingly named him "Spikey."  I was impressed at how much the students were able to add in the "What We Think We Know" column.  They were also able to formulate some really good questions about what they would like to learn during our unit.  We are still adding new information to the "What We Learned" column each day. 

This was MY sample.



This is a student's finished product. 


This week in literacy I introduced contractions to my students.  This is a very difficult concept even for my higher level kiddos.  I thought it would be cute to design a dinosaur themed practice activity for our contractions.  Each half of the egg has one of the base words that makes up the new "dino" contraction.  The kids got a kick out of the activity and (hopefully) some good practice!  A lot of them didn't know dinosaurs hatch from eggs like birds, and so they were tickled to learn something new. 



These are two writing samples from my class.  They had to come up with a name for their pet dino and write it in the name tag.  Many of the kiddos named their dinosaur "Cookie," "Cook," or "Mrs. Cook."  Not sure what they were implying...



I read the classic Danny and the Dinosaur to my students and then asked them to close their eyes and imagine being able to spend the day with their very own pet dinosaur.  Next, I had them create original writing with the prompt "If I had a pet dinosaur..."  Their writing was fantastic!  Kids really thrive when able to create fun and imaginative writings.   

Students hard at work extracting chocolate chip cookies from the fossil dig site.

Today the students got to do something really cool!  They got to become paleontologists.  I gave each student a chocolate chip cookie and a toothpick and told them that his/her job was to excavate as many whole chocolate chips from the cookie as possible... just like they were digging out fossils from a dig site.  The kiddos were not allowed to move their cookie or eat the chips they extracted.  Many of them found it to be very difficult to do without breaking the chips.  Afterwards, of course, we ate our "fossils."  They recorded their information and observations on the worksheet below. 

This week has been a blast so far!  I can't wait to make some dinosaur eggs and fossils! 

Love,
Mrs. Cook