Dinosaurs from lizards?

25/07/2008 (Friday)

a) Where did Dinosaurs come from?
* Kids looked at pictures involving the different stages of earth:
a) no life b) primitive animals such as jellyfish
and sponges in the sea.
c) Invertebrate backbones in the sea. d) Vertebrate
fishes
e) Frog-like animals that live in water and on land.
f) The first reptiles similar to frog-like creatures.
g) Triassic dinosaurs, Jurassic dinosaurs and
Cretaceous dinosaurs.
h) Caveman, mammals and birds.
* Dinosaurs probably developed from ‘thecodonts” an
early small and medium-sized reptiles. There were many
types and they mixed around to form different types of
dinosaurs.
* That explains why a mixture marriage between 2
different races produce unique looking babies
YP : “Maybe a big meat-eater married to another
meat-eater will get a T-Rex”…..that’s the
theory.

b) What’s next?
* The kids looked at their incomplete Stegosaurus. ZYg asked, ‘What about the legs?” ZY said, “Let’s
use small boxes.” T: “What about something stronger?” M: “What about plastic?” ZY: “Our
recycled plastic bottles!” T: Good idea.

T: What about the spikes?
YZ: We can use colour paper.
T : Anything stronger?
J : Smaller plastic bottles.
T : Good idea!

c) Reading time
* After tea-break, I allowed the kids 10 minutes to read books. They like reading while chatting and sharing information.
* SYu was complaining to me, “XR doesn’t want to befriend me.”
XR : “SYu doesn’t let me play with her.”
T : Is there such thing?
SYu : (silence) SJ asked me not to let her play.
* Thus, I drew 3 faces namely A,B and C. If A wants to play with B, who will fell sad? Class: “C will be sad!” YP : Then you cannot sleep well. ZY : Because you have hurt your friend. C might also asked somebody not play with A and B. Everyone will be very sad. Sad people usually has no friends. Hmm….throughout the next hour, there was no quarreling. Hm……let’s see next week.

d) Enough characters?
ZY: We want to have a performance for The Stegosaurus
story.
T: That will have to depend on your hard work and
responsibilities. Do we have enough characters
for all our 19 friends？
Class: No!
* So we added a few other characters including jelly fish and the frog-like creatures.

e) Stegosaurus craft.
* Today we focused on the dino’s legs. They were divided into groups. Altogether, there were 4 big bottles and 3 small bottles as legs and spikes.
* they tear the newspaper into bits of pieces. Then glued together as a team. They were quite efficient and the results were quite nice.

f) Afternoon session.
* They enjoyed themselves.
* They dug a long river which flows into a big sea. When the water couldn’t flow into the big sea, they learnt that the river should be from higher to lower level in order for the water to flow smoothly.
* We revised our phonics books on “A Dog and A Fox” and “Sim and Kim”. We read together. I got ZY to be a little helper.. After rewarding stickers, they continue colouring their unfinished workbook of “The Dinosaur World”.