Laying the foundation?
Throughout this inquiry unit I introduce students to a variety of thinking strategies while exploring the topic of dinosaurs.
What we think we know...
To start off this inquiry unit I had the students tell me everything that they thought they knew about dinosaurs. This gave me a better sense of how familiar they were with the topic as well as any misconceptions that they may have, such as dinosaurs loving snow. I asked students to share what they thought instead of what knew in order to accommodate for these misconceptions. This also gave students the opportunity to re-evaluate their own thinking throughout this inquiry process.
Our dinosaur wonderings...
In this activity I had students share any and all of the wonderings that they had about dinosaurs. This encouraged them to think deeper about the topic while also enabling me to determine where their thinking was at as well as any additional misconceptions that they may have. For example, several students were curious as to whether dinosaurs ate people. This showed me that they were uncertain about the timeline of dinosaurs and may even be confusing real life events with fictional shows such as Jurassic Park. Thus this made it clear which topics I may need to address throughout this inquiry unit.
Addressing student's misconceptions
This was not a topic that I had planned to spend an entire lesson on. However, throughout the "I Think" and "I Wonder" activities it became clear that several of the students had misconceptions about the habitat that dinosaurs lived in. Therefore, I knew that it was important for us to address this topic as a class. Nevertheless, I didn't want to just give students all the answers because that wouldn't help them develop better critical thinking skills. This is why I showed students several dinosaur books and had them determine what kind of habitat dinosaurs lived in.
Dinosaur Timeline
Another misconception that students had was about when dinosaurs were alive in relation to humans. Much of this confusion was fuelled by shows that they had seen which is why we also discussed the difference between real make-believe events throughout this activity. For the bulk of this activity, I read a few pages out of a dinosaur information book and then asked students to place the pictures where they thought they should be in the timeline. The students did a great job and determining this timeline and they referred back to it numerous times throughout the remainder of the unit.
How did the dinosaurs go extinct?
This was an interesting topic to discuss with students because it was easy to see which students had been told by another source how dinosaurs went extinct versus which students were attempting to sort it out based on their own thinking. For example, some students talked about meteors and volcanic eruptions. However, when I asked why they thought what they did they typically referred to a movie or book that they had seen. Whereas another student said that she believed that their hearts got sick and that's why they went extinct. In this second example it's clear that the student is making connections between their own experiences and what we are discussing in school.
How do we know about dinosaurs?
Throughout this activity we talked about how we know about dinosaurs even though they died so long ago. At first students suggested that they know what they do because we told them. However, as we switched our discussion over to how scientists know about dinosaurs, students were able to determine the importance of fossils. During this activity I had students pretend to be palaeontologists as we went on a field trip around the class to discover different dinosaur bones. We discovered the dinosaur bones of four dinosaurs that the students were fairly familiar with. However, at the end of the activity I provided students with some new information as I introduced them to a new dinosaur, the nodosaur. This was a dinosaur that was very well preserved and was discovered in Alberta in 2011.
What we learned about dinosaurs...
I concluded this inquiry unit by asking the students to share what they learned about dinosaurs. They had so many great ideas for this final discussion and were very eager to share all that they had learned. I was very excited that several of the students were able to share things that we had discussed a couple weeks prior as well as ideas that had just been covered.
