We have had the most amazing discovery this week in Holly Class – DINOSAUR FOSSSILS in our outside area! To say that the children were excited was an understatement. They could not believe their eyes and quickly started guessing which dinosaur it might be. Some children started doing research to compare the bones to different dinosaurs, some children measured the bones whilst others were keen to keep exploring the area. Soon they were convinced that they had found other dinosaur bones so we turned the area in to an excavation site. We discussed what a paleontologist was and how fossils are carefully excavated from the earth. The childrne have then spent most of the week carefully exploring the area finding small ‘fossils’ and exposing more of the larger ‘dinosaur skull’. We have also been learning how to become researchers with our grown ups modelling how to take notes and us making our own notes for the first time. We created a list of questions we wanted to find out more about – some are really challenging such as ‘have they ever found dinosaur skin when they found fossils?’, ‘How do we really know what killed the dinosaurs and how did humans then start growing on the Earth?’, ‘How were fossils formed?’ and ‘how many types of dinosaurs actually are there?’ We ended up actually finding out lots more information than we ever expected too including that there were three types of animals alive at the same time as the dinosaurs(dinosaurs, bird like pteresaurs and ocean mammal like dinosaurs)!!! There was a dinosaur fossil found in Clifton in the 1800’s (the same time the first ever dinosaur fossils were found), that T-rex and Triceratops lived in America and so much more. As you can see everyone in Holly Class are really excited by our new topic. They have been exploring it in so many ways through continuous provision and through some amazing writing opportunities that you will be able to see in their books! We can’t wait to see what they find out next!