Bones 

with Mrs. Starko's Class

We have been working with the word habitat, lately and have created habitats in shoe boxes and on Styrofoam plates for printing.  Now we will be creating dinosaurs in clay that the children can fire and paint.  We will be using the plastic animals as models but the children will have to create their own dinosaurs.  Their first constructions were of bones they dug from
the bone bed.  This idea of bones continues to interest the children in a big way, more than anything else.   I gave the children Xeroxed copies of animals and using our special paint pens the children drew bones on the inside of the animal.  They had a skeleton book they could look at but they were left to solve problems and come up with their own way of adding bones. They really enjoyed this.

The second step came when I ran off a variety of dinosaurs as well.  This time we talked about the bones again and how the dinosaurs can be divided into two main groups of dinosaurs according to their hip bones.  Lizard  hip or bird hip.  Each of these is further divided to include all the dinosaurs that the children know.   We are now going to draw the different hip bones onto the pictures and then add the other bones using the same pens.  The children are very anxious to start this.  We know frogs have bones and bugs do not.  We know lizards do but not crickets or crabs or octopus etc.  This is what we are currently pursuing in the area of dinosaur.  The children are not interested in building their own model.  They are content with the placing of the bones into the pictures of the dinosaurs.