Fossils and Dinosaurs Lesson Plan

We will be doing this lesson as a group activity with some of our friends from girl scouts. Discover (Introduction):Do a role-play of the rock cycle. Tell students that they are going to pretend to be a rock, but they will change through a long, long period of time. Have them start the role-play by sitting along the top of a small hill (a dry ditch bank will work well). Have them close their eyes and listen carefully until there is an action part to act out. Read or paraphrase the following story:Imagine you are a rock about the size of an apple. You live on a warm hillside above a huge valley. The river roars far down below, but up here it sounds like a small “shhhhh….” In the winter you are worried about a crack right behind you. Water fills the crack on warm days, and during the cold nights, it freezes and expands the crack, inching you closer and closer to the edge. (students inch toward downhill). One warm spring, the mud around you is soft and wet from the rains, The ground suddenly begins to shake from a small earthquake (students shake), and you slowly start tipping over and rolling down the hill! (students act out as you read). On the roll down hill you get dizzy and two of your sharp corners break off (ouch!). You roll all the way down the hill and splash into the river. The river is fast! It starts carrying you downstream, bouncing you on the bottom, breaking off more of your corners until you are round – a perfect river rock (students roll into a ball). Rolling along the bottom, you get smaller and smaller -- until you are just a moving ooze of sand. One day the river suddenly stops and the water tastes salty. You are in the ocean! Finally you can rest, and you do – for thousands of years. While you are resting, the other sand-people, like you, start resting too – on top of you (students layer over each other – 2 or 3 deep). You feel like you are getting squashed and you stick together with your friends and become one rock (a sandstone) again. But you keep sinking and sinking because more sand is layering over you, and you change again into another rock – a really squashed one! You get pushed down so far into the earth that it gets very warm – so warm you start to melt! (students ooze out from their layers) Suddenly, you feel like you are in a fast elevator, shooting up through a crack in the earth (students run uphill). You blast from the ground way up in the air (jump) and land on the slope of a big volcano! It is so cool that you harden right away into another kind of rock made of what was melted rock. And here you sit, on the edge of a mountain, looking down into a valley at a river far, far below. I wonder what will happen to you now? Now ask the students, "Do rocks ever change?" "How long does it take?" "Does it seem like you went in a big circle (cycle) when you were a rock?" You did, you went through a cycle where you became 3 different types of rocks:sedimentary – other rocks ground up and squashed togethermetamorphic – squashed really hard and cooked, but not meltedigneous – melted and then cooled to hardenIn one type of these rocks, a type that is not squashed really hard and not melted, something special can be found. Do you know what can be found in sedimentary rocks? Fossils. Fossils are destroyed if the rocks are subjected to great heat and pressure (In the formation of metamorphic rocks) so they can only be found in sedimentary rocks. Ask the kids if they have every seen a fossil? Where? Explain that some people have jobs that where they search for fossils and bring them back to museums so that scientists can study and learn about the dinosaurs and then teach us about the dinosaurs. Read Barnum Brown: Dinosaur Hunter by David Sheldon about a fossil hunter who made a contribution to a museum and made a difference in our world. Connect (Team Building/Cooperation/Increase Self-Confidence):How big do the kids think the fossils were that Barnum Brown found? Explain that some dinosaurs were large and some were small. Have the kids help measure out dinosaur strides and place life size footprints down. Have the kids see what size strides they can take. Explain that we will make some smaller fossils. Have each child make fossils for each child to take home. Explain that when scientists look at dinosaur fossils, they are able to determine what type of food they might have eaten. Use a hand-held mirror to have kids examine their own teeth. Have them make observations such as the front teeth are long, wide and flat; there are four of these. The next ones are long, round and have a point; there is only one of these longer ones on each side of my mouth. The molars are next and are round and short but are rough on the top; we have two or three of the molars on each side of our mouths. The same type of teeth are on my upper jaw as on my lower jaw, etc. Ask questions such as "Which teeth are for tearing off pieces of meat?" (The incisors, which have sharp points on them. These are for biting also.) What are the back teeth for? (For grinding and smashing into smaller pieces so that we can swallow our food.) These teeth are also called molars. In Spanish, the word molar means "to grind," which is what these teeth do to the food before we swallow.Which teeth are we using to eat our "plants"? (We bite first, and then we chew; but we don't have to tear the fruit or vegetables.) Humans have both kinds of teeth because humans eat meat, and humans eat plants also. What do we think if a dinosaur skull is found and all its teeth, but a few front ones, are flat? (That they were plant eaters.) What do we think if a dinosaur skull is found and all its teeth, but a few front ones, have sharp points? (That they were meat eaters.) Use microscope to examine shark teeth.Based on what they observed with the microscope do the kids think that sharks eat meat or plants. Reiterate that sharp teeth are used for cutting and tearing meat and that the flat teeth are use for eating plants. Explain that plant-eating dinosaurs still need to grind up their food but they have a special part of their body called a gizzard. Have kids make a dinosaur gizzard.Take ActionClose with discussion about why scientists are important, why learning about our world is important and how now that we know that rocks can hold valuables such as fossils how do the girls think we should treat our natural world.