Sorry it’s been so long!!! It’s been a very busy couple of months and after our winter topic was put on hold because of the lack of winter weather! the childrens interest in dinosaurs took off like never before. It was amazing. The children were certainly enthusiastic about learning. We used a variety of storybooks (especially Harry & The Dinosaurs) and information books that the children spent a long time looking at and they were accessible all around the Nursery.

We had an excavation of dinosaur bones in sand stone and with lots of hard work, concentration and perseverance they managed to then assemble it into Triceratops.

We had an archaeological dig at the sand tray with hard hats, trowels, brushes, clipboard and a dinosaur dig information sheet to fill in for early literacy. We also had bones, sieves, dinosaurs and eggs. They certainly developed their language – meat eater, plant eater, herbivore, carnivore, palaeontologist, excavation, spiky, bony plates, extinct, etc. We managed to buy a fantastic excavation product from TTS.

At the water tray we had a dinosaur swamp for a sensory activity. This was hugely popular. If you can get hold of Gelli Baff in green that’s even better 😉

At the craft the children made gorgeous woolly mammoths from plastic milk cartons (Elmer style) with white pipe cleaners threaded through for tusks.

We had a collection of dinosaurs for grouping in the small imaginative area and at the maths table they were sorting by size and matching and also measured the length of bones and put them into order of size. They also played Dotty Dinosaurs (an Orchard Toy product) which concentrates on colour and shape recognition.

The children have also enjoyed a science experiment  to free dinosaurs that were stuck in a block of ice and worked out how they could get the ice to melt. We had  lots of interesting suggestions of how we could do this!

At the dough table they were having fun making play dough leaves for the dinosaur to eat, dinosaur eggs to go in the nest, and dinosaur bones and horns.

The children  produced some beautiful drawings and paintings of dinosaurs and they were on display throughout the Nursery. They also made dinosaur skeletons with art straws.

The children enjoyed making their own fossils by imprinting into dough and also made giant dinosaur footprints. A few families went to see the T-Rex and a Stegosaurus skeletons in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and it was  free to get in. They all had a fabulous time and Lily emailed photos to us so that we could print them off for the displays.

We used a trundle wheel to measure the size of a diplodocus outside by counting the clicks. Mrs Galloway chalked it out and the staff and children then went out to stand inside from one end to the other to see how many it would take to fill it. We also had a strip of masking tape on the corridor floor which was the width of a pteranodons wing. Boy I am glad they are extinct.

The children moved to music by stomping, moving fast, slow,etc. and they even had a volcano! for snack. The topic was endless and we sure had plenty of effective contributors and successful learners.