Trails Optional

My favourite lesson!  Twice now I’ve taken on the Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins Geocaching lesson.  The original idea came from educaching.net – a fabulous resource which really helped me get going with geocaching in the classroom.

But I always like to make things my own and take things to a new level.

The Lesson:

We read the Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins – a book all about the first person to try and create life-sized models of what dinosaurs actually looked like.

The story is fabulous – Waterhouse Hawkins is an artist.  He consulted with scientists, but he really looked at creating and visualizing dinosaurs from an artist’s point of view.

The book goes through the process of model building with clay and with a frame, so I took my cues from this to turn it into a lesson sculpting and building this year.  Last time I was focusing more on 2d and 3d perspective, but this time it was on dinosaur details.

The students were silent – there is something about dinosaurs which students love – but it plays right into our current investigation topic!

We set out with the GPS into the school yard to find our own dinosaur bones to try and create our own models.  I had set up 11 caches each full of painted wooden dinosaur bones.  I picked up 8 wooden models from a craft store.  6 dinosaurs were velociraptors, one for each group, with some triceratops and Tyrannosaurs thrown in for good measure.

After scouring the school grounds for our all of our pieces (there is a red foot piece out there somewhere….) we built the wooden models – with extra bones thrown in from other dinosaurs just to frustrate and make everyone think.

Some of the students liked to see what the model should look like, some wanted to use their imaginations.  I also handed out clay.  A lot of the students were really into building a clay version of the dinosaur.  They wanted to manipulate and try different things.  Some really wanted to be precise and build thing just ‘so’  It was the perfect blend of artistic and scientific points of view coming together.

The next step was to share and connect our learning.  This is harder in Scotland than it should be.  I’ve used Skype extensively, and it was a great way to connect very easily.  In Scotland I can’t connect outside the country without guest logins, approval, paperwork, and hassle.  Luckily a school on Islay (an island off the west coast of Scotland) had a P1/2 class learning about dinosaurs.  We used Glow meet (Adobe Connect), part of the Glow Intranet system (that’s intra – as in not to connect outside…don’t get me started)

Our connect is tomorrow – I’ll update tomorrow with how sharing our learning went!