It's a compsognathus!!!!

All week we have been trying to work out what type of dinosaur the fossil was by looking for clues.

We predicted it ate meat because of its sharp teeth and claws. We also noticed it had bones in its stomach from a lizard. 

We knew it was an adult and we measured that it was only 1 metre long. We decided it is a very small dinosaur.

We also decided it was probably fast because it was small and had skinny legs. Osten thought its tail would help it to balance.

When we were looking at a YouTube clip about the size of different dinosaurs we discovered a dinosaur that was 1 metre long and wondered if that was our mystery fossil.

We were right! - It's a compsognathus!!!!

Some of the facts in the video below are not right now but we learned that scientists change what they think about dinosaurs based on the evidence they find. 

Measuring fun

To help us learn more about our mystery dinosaur fossil we measured different parts of its body using wool. We then looked around the studio to see if we could find anything the same length as its toe, tail, head and leg.

The dinosaur's head was the same length as Osten's hand.

The tail was nearly as long as Alex's leg.

We also measured the length of the dinosaur and found out it was the same as our metre ruler. We measured all around the studio to see where the dinosaur could hide if it was still alive today.

The tent was too small.

We discovered that the mystery dinosaur could hide
- under the lego table
- behind the iPad cupboard
- behind the whiteboards
- under the jellybean table
-behind the big TV
and behind and in front of the couch.

If the Dinosaurs Came Back

We read 'If the Dinosaur came back' by Bernard Most. 
We then made our own books using book creator on the iPad. We learned how to use the camera function and recording function.

Ti Kouka we need your help

We have been sent a fossil all the way from Germany. The palaeontologists need our help to work out what kind of dinosaur it is.

 We have taped it off and it will be waiting for you to examine on Monday.

We are Palaeontologists!

This week we got to visit the Canterbury museum. We had lots of fun learning about dinosaurs with Anthony.

We learnt lots of cool things like...

A T-Rex only has two claws on each hand.

Did you know a dinosaur needs to....

have scaly skin

lay eggs

have straight legs

live on the land

That means a pterodactyl is not a dinosaur. It is a flying lizard!

It took some convincing for us to believe that.  

Anthony was great at answering our questions. 

We got to look at some fossils. Some were real and some were copies.

Daisy was amazed as to how big a T-Rex tooth is. 

 

We even got to hold a fossilised dinosaur poo!

T14 loved the Allosaurus...

and we had fun trying to walk with bent legs. Dinosaurs legs are straight because of a hole in their hip bones so their legs work like ours. Crocodiles have bent legs so they are reptiles, not dinosaurs.

 We loved playing in the gardens at lunchtime.

It was a great day. Thank you to all the wonderful parent helpers who came with us.

What we wonder about Dinosaurs...

This week in writing time we wrote about dinosaurs.


First, we wrote down all the facts we know about dinosaurs and shared these with our group.


Then we wrote down what we wanted to find out about dinosaurs.
We tried to use these words at the start of our questions-


When     Where      What     Who   Which   How

We also remembered to put a question mark at the end.