When we were planning for our learning context of Dinosaurs, we wanted to know what they ate.  This afternoon we pretended to be palaeontologists and studied dinosaurs’ teeth.  We concentrated on the differences between herbivores and carnivores.  We made models of the two different teeth, flat molars and pointy canines, as those were the teeth we saw in fossilised skulls.  We used flour to pretend it was another dinosaur and dropped our model teeth into it.  We then carefully measured how deep they went.  We learned that the pointy teeth went in deeper and so carnivores, dinosaurs that ate meat, had lots of pointy teeth.

Some herbivores had comb like teeth, like the diplodocus.  They would strip the leaves and swallow them without chewing.  To help them digest their food they may have swallowed stones to help them break up and digest their food, as some birds do today.  We tried this using lettuce.  When we shook the cup with the lettuce and stones the lettuce did get mushier.