Memories of a kindergarten dinosaur inquiry: “What can we learn about dinosaurs?”

A quiet JK dinosaur expert guided us through this learning journey as we transformed our classroom into a Jurassic World, became paleontologists who worked hard at fossil hunting outdoors, and hatched baby dinosaurs from eggs! Cross-curricular connections to math (measurement, data management), language, health, drama, science.

Read more below about our prehistoric, paleontological adventures!

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Memories of a dinosaur inquiry: “What can we learn about dinosaurs?”

At the end of our previous (pirate) inquiry, we wrote a class fiction story and our pirate protagonists ended up on an island. Much to their surprise, there were dinosaurs on the island! This started some exciting discussions about dinosaurs, especially with one quiet student in our class who confidently spoke up to say he knew EVERYTHING about dinosaurs! Thus began our dinosaur inquiry. Even though there are no dinosaurs in the world anymore, paleontologists have discovered a lot about them, so we were determined to learn as much as we could!

We designed plans to transform our classroom into a ‘Jurassic World’. As always, we took to the books to learn all that we could about dinosaurs in order to guide our planning. The sand table became a place to hunt for dinosaur bones. The playdough table became a place to create fossils by making imprints of dinosaur toys. The art table became a place to plan and then make models of dinosaurs we’d seen in books. The dramatic play area was a place to travel back in time to live like the dinosaurs. 

We learned that some dinosaurs were plant-eaters and some were meat-eaters. We built on what we’d learned from our food inquiry about healthy eating and learned to make some kid-friendly ‘herbivore’ and ‘carnivore’ snacks (with health and math connections) - like fruit kebabs and meat kebabs (patterns), and ‘ants on a log’ (addition and subtraction to 10). We looked in our lunches every day for fruits, vegetables, grain foods, and protein foods.

When we wondered about dinosaur eggs, nests, and babies, we made a nest and ‘hatched’ some dinosaur eggs that one student had found at a store. Before hatching the eggs, we wrote about our observations and predictions based on what we noticed using our senses. We recorded our observations of how the eggs changed every day until they hatched. We later wrote a class fiction story about ‘Stompy’ and ‘Rosie’, our two baby dinosaurs.

We did lots of dinosaur math, including graphing and measuring, both indoors with our toys and outdoors where there was space to count steps and measure the actual lengths of different kinds of dinosaurs. We couldn’t believe how long real dinosaurs were from top to tail! 

Outside we also did a lot of fossil hunting - digging out from beneath the snow and dirt any sticks and rocks that looked like fossils and bones. Every day we took our nonfiction books outside with us so that when we found interesting pieces, the pictures could help us ‘identify’ what we’d found! We used tools and markers that were similar to those we’d seen in videos we watched of paleontologists at work. As usual, we wrote about our discoveries every day in our outdoor learning journals.

Reflections: 

Inquiry-based learning can be extremely valuable for the fact that it gives different students different opportunities to be experts about different things. Our quiet young dinosaur expert was a leader throughout the entire inquiry. Everyone went to him with their questions and he gained confidence and a new level of respect and friendship from his peers.