Jurassic Park Day

Well last week I had what has got to be one of the MOST FUN days I have ever had in a classroom!

I just love reading blogs and I am ALWAYS on the lookout for new ways to engage my students in any way I can! I came across a blog post by Hope King about some Jurassic World themed lessons she had done with her yr 7’s and yr 8’s and I fell in LOVE!!!

I love dinosaurs and I just LOVE the Jurassic serious so I got to work brainstorming how I could do something similar in my class!

Let’s start with decorations!!!

I only had a weekend to create everything and one afternoon to get it all set up for the next day.

I am very lucky to have an incredible Mum who is very creative! (she passed her love for it onto me!) She helped me with decorations!!! Mums are just the best.

We created some vines using brown material and coloured paper for the leaves!

Mum had these bamboo mini fences in the shed so I grabbed those!!!

Mum also added two palm trees to my collection!

I used some garbage bags, pie tins, aluminium foil and some pipe to create our Jurassic Park Jeeps!!!!

Finally I taped off some areas with my DANGER! Do not Enter Tape!!!!

Oh also we made EPIC head lights using push lights and headbands! The kids went NUTS over them!

I had sent each child an invitation to our Jurassic Park day to get them excited! They were told to dress up as explorer / paleontologists to get ready to come on our tour!!

I created a PowerPoint as our ‘tour’ of the park it took us through each step of the day!

As students entered the classroom I turned the lights off and played the Jurassic Park soundtrack using Youtube – the first song is SO CREEPY! It is wonderful because it made the classroom feel eerie!!!

When the students came in I introduced myself as a park ranger and went through the ‘safety’ features of the park.

We discussed how we had electronic fences and to not touch or go beyond these points! (these were the DANGER tape!)

Some of my class can get quite loud so we discussed that some dinosaurs react to movement and noise so they must maintain an appropriate noise level at all times!

Finally I showed them their jeeps and loaded them in remind them to keep their valuable body parts inside the jeep at all times to avoid a dinosaur snacking on it!

I found a YouTube clip of some travelers riding a jeep through one of the locations of Jurassic Park – we used this for when our jeep was moving to the next stop! They kids loved it and jumped up and down as if they were in a bumpy jeep!!!

Onto the activities!!!

We crammed a lot into the time we had! We had a mix of Science, English and a tiny bit of Maths tasks but if we had more time there would have been some more Maths too!

First up was looking at the science of fossils! We learnt that they type of scientists who study fossils are called paleontologists and dug for some dinosaur bones in groups!

Then we read a passage about fossils and had to identify the main idea using some skills we have learnt previously.   

I then handed them a ‘fossil’ that I had created by imprinting parts of toy dinosaurs on play dough. We tried to guess what parts were shown in the fossils! We had wings, claws, foot prints, plates and spikes, heads, legs and even tails!

Afterwards students worked with a partner to chip away at a ‘rock’ to find a fossil below. (I got the eggs for $2 at Kmart!!!) BEST MOMENT EVER!!! They were so utterly engaged and it took them a good 20 minutes to get through and not one person was off task for even for a second!

Next we drove in our jeeps to look at dinosaurs! We watched some clips from Jurassic Park via YouTube of the first time they saw the dinosaurs and the eggs hatching in the lab! I turned the volume off just to monitor the language but had the soundtrack still playing.

Then we discussed the life cycle of a dinosaur and students had to sequence and describe the life cycle of a Triceratops!

After this we drove to the stegosaurus and discussed dinosaur adaptions! We matched some adaptions to their purpose!

We journeyed on to look at the triceratops and we discussed ways the scientists find out information about animals today. We talked about how sometimes if we want to know what an animals has been eating we can look at their poo!!!

And would you believe it one of the triceratops was sick and we needed to know what she had been eating! I gave each group a bowl of DINO DUNG to investigate! (IT was chocolate YoGo mixed with crushed cookies with some different plants placed underneath)

This was an absolute riot to watch!!!!

*Hint: Leave the poo activity until LAST it went EVERYWHERE and made it hard to do the over tasks.

We had finished with the herbivore enclosure and headed over to the carnivore section, starting with my most feared dinosaur - the Velociraptor cage!!

We discussed what a carnivore/ herbivore is and then each student was handed a dinosaur. They had to classify it is was a carnivore or herbivore and serve it a meal by drawing it on a small piece of paper!   

Finally we stopped at the T-REX enclosure! I used a STEM challenge from one of Cara Carroll’s science units (side note those units are A-MAZ-ING!! Check them out!) where my students had to create a T-Rex using straws and plasticine. I changed the height to be the size of a 30cm ruler and they worked in pairs. They were given a set number of straws and that was all they were given. They could used scissors and a ruler to help but no other 
equipment. It was a great challenge that they found quite challenging but it was wonderful for them!

Check out some photo snaps!!

Well I was one EXHAUSTED teacher by the end of it!

I was covered in ‘Diino Dung’, fossil remains and generals sweat from running around like a crazy dinosaur lady!

BUT IT WAS WELL WORTH IT!