Budding Paleontologists

If you walk into our classroom at 2:30 any afternoon, you won't be greeted by second grade students.  No, you'll be greeted by paleontologists-in-training!  We recently started a fossil and dinosaur unit and have been very busy learning about this science field!

To learn about fossils, we first learned just how hard it is to conduct a field excavation.  We used chocolate chip cookies to explore this aspect of the job.  Students had to excavate chocolate chips (which symbolized fossils) from the cookies (which symbolized gravel and soil).  We learned that it is much harder than it looks!

After we learned how paleontologists do fossil excavations, we examined some real fossils.  The paleontologists-in-training had to find a fossil (or many) in the rocks and try to identify the organism that created them.

Next up, we're going to learn about the types of dinosaurs (carnivores and herbivores).  After that we'll do a research project on specific dinosaurs!