Dinosaurs

Read a detailed book about dinosaurs such as National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs. Identify parts of the story — titles, subtitles, sidebars, key words, etc.

Pick a dinosaur to research. Create an oral presentation and a diorama to share orally with your class.

Name three reasons that dinosaurs would have a hard time living in this time period. Cite specific reasons from reading materials.

Using dinosaur shaped gummies, crackers or cookies, perform simple math calculations of adding and subtracting.

Hand out teacher-created pictures of various dinosaurs to scale. Have students "order" the size of the beasts. Create a "to scale" human to compare. Be sure to impress upon students that dinosaurs did not exist at the same time as humans.

Using dinosaur-shaped gummies, crackers or cookies, count the food items, then pair them up to determine if they are odd or even.

Using word or some other clipart source, students create a pattern worksheet using dinosaur shapes. Make an answer key for the next three shapes in the pattern. Share with a younger student (like a 2nd grader) and have them solve it.

Some events happen very quickly; others occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe. Further Explanation: Examples of events and timescales could include volcanic explosions and earthquakes, which happen quickly, and erosion of rocks, which occurs slowly.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction. Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc. Further Explanation: Examples of structures could include thorns, stems, roots, colored petals, heart, stomach, lung, brain, and skin.

Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to earth forces, such as earthquakes. The presence and location of certain fossil types indicate the order in which rock layers were formed. 

Some kinds of plants and animals that once lived on Earth are no longer found anywhere. Fossils provide evidence about the types of organisms that lived long ago and also about the nature of their environments.

Sometimes the differences in characteristics between individuals of the same species provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.

When the environment changes in ways that affect a place’s physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.

The collection of fossils and their placement in chronological order is known as the fossil record and documents the change of many life forms throughout the history of the Earth.

Anatomical similarities and differences between various organisms living today and between them and organisms in the fossil record enable the classification of living things.

The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history. Analyses of rock strata and the fossil record provide relative dates, not an absolute scale. Emphasis is on how analyses of rock formations and the fossils they contain are used to establish relative ages of major events in Earth's history. Examples of Earth's major events could range from being very recent (such as the last Ice Age or the earliest fossils of homo sapiens) to very old (such as the formation of Earth or the earliest evidence of life). Examples can include the formation, evolution or extinction of particular living organisms.