While I wait for my laptop to be "rehabilitated", I have decided to not wait any longer and post information on my husband's computer about what my students have been doing the past five weeks while I have been without my laptop. The children ended their animal study by examining owl pellets. Using gloves and masks, they pulled apart the pellets to discover heads and other boney parts of animals that the owls had consumed. The second graders had discussed and examined the food web of owls, small mammals, and rodents, tracing the food web all the way down to the plants or decomposing matter in the ground. They used a chart that displayed the skeletons of all the animals in their food web and then determined which animal their owl had eaten. The photo above shows two children working together as they analyze the contents of their owl pellet.
After our animal study we moved into prehistoric animals which included dinosaurs. We compared the size of dinosaurs to real objects that we would find in today's world. We discovered how fossils help us learn many things about dinosaurs, such as their shape, size, the food they ate, and how they moved. We used the Internet in the computer lab and a map of the United States to locate places throughout the United States where dinosaur bones have been found. We also located the various places in the United States where we can find natural history museums that have dinosaurs and dinosaur bones on exhibit. There are two places in Ohio. One is in Cincinnati; and the other is in Cleveland. We learned a new word, too. The new word is paleontologist. Now we understand the valuable kind of work this special scientist does.
We created our own fossils using play dough, sea shells, plastic wrap, plaster of Paris, and plastic milk bottles from our lunches. You can see the results above. Like an authentic "dig", we had to brush off some of the debris (play dough, in our case) to get to the fossil. This was only after we were able to cut off the plastic milk bottle from the play dough and the plaster. We, of course, recycled the cut up milk bottles.
The fossils created such a stir in our classroom that one child brought in a museum-quality shark tooth and a mastadon tooth to share with the class. Booth can be seen above.
