Help young children understand dinosaur fossils with stories and hands-on activities.
Concepts revolving around prehistoric times are tough for young children to grasp, especially at the preschool age when they have trouble comprehending the passage of time. But the amazing creatures of these time periods are fascinating for many children, and there are ways of explaining large ideas to small children so they can understand dinosaurs and their relatives. Construct a unit for your preschool class about fossils to get them excited about science. You can connect dinosaurs to many other lessons also, with dinosaur crafts, phonetics and math.
Extinction Play
Using plastic dinosaurs, put on a small play for the children to help them visualize what happened to the dinosaurs. Turn a table on its side to use as the stage and play music in the background. Start with the dinosaurs wandering and eating. Then remove them and put up a couple of humans and remind students that there are no dinosaurs today. Put the dinosaurs back and illustrate possible causes of extinction, such as an asteroid. Drop a ball on the dinosaurs for an asteroid.
Creating Fossils
After students understand that dinosaurs became extinct, show them pictures of fossils and explain that they are like little clues the dinosaurs left behind, which is how we knew they were there. Give students clay or play-dough and plastic dinosaurs and let them make tracks with the dinosaurs' feet. Make prints while students' eyes are closed and then have them guess which dinosaurs made the print. Bring in clean turkey or chicken bones to make impressions in the clay that look more like the real fossils that the students saw in the pictures.
Palaeontology Dig
Either have the students help you make fossils or make them yourself out of air-drying clay or using plaster of Paris in dirt or sand. Make fossils of dinosaur tracks with toy dinosaurs, fossils of plants using ferns and pine-cones and fossils of bones using clean chicken bones. Then bury the fossils in the dirt in the school yard or just in bins of dirt in the classroom. Give students paintbrushes to use as palaeontology tools and explain that they must dig up the fossils very carefully and that real fossils are usually very far apart.
Children's Books about Fossils
Stories can help preschool students comprehend difficult concepts, so if you have trouble finding the words to make fossilization clear, read the students a children's book. "Digging Up Dinosaurs" by Aliki and "If You Are a Hunter of Fossils" by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnell both explain palaeontology and fossilization in terms intended for very young children. "Dwight and the Trilobite" by Gina Erickson, M.A., Kelli C. Foster, Ph.D. and Gifford Russell is a story about a boy and a fossil, and also includes factual information.
Tags: with dinosaurs, young children, chicken bones, explain that, explain that they, Give students
