Excavation

The excavation on a new layer of learning began this morning. Students started our new learning by excavating "fossils" (chocolate chips) from "rocks" (cookies).

We had the opportunity to make connections to text. Our discussions included talking about different careers. For some of us, we considered the career possibility of being a paleontologist, until we started excavating "fossils" and realized it was tedious ... for others, we started excavating "fossils" and thought it had possibilities ...  "maybe paleontology ..." Excavating also has many connections to our community, as several community members work in the field of excavation.

After the excavation, we had the opportunity to enjoy a cookie as we checked out the new book we'll be reading.

We wrote predictions about the book.

After we wrote our predictions, we started the read the beginning of the book. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is 15 feet tall and 40 feet long. We have a ten foot ceiling in our classroom, so we imagined a fourth grader (about five feet tall) on top of our ceiling to have a sense of the dinosaur's height. Then we figured if each fourth grader is about five feet tall, it would take about eight fourth graders laying end-to-end to have an idea about the length of a T-Rex. So we went out into the hallway to visualize the length.

Just another morning of learning in fourth grade ... wonder what we'll excavate next!