Excavation

Today in Ms. Leom's Flex Reading groups started our Digging up Tyrannosaurus Rex learning. It is a nonfiction book.

 To get a "feel" for our author's experience, we excavated "fossils" (chocolate chips) from the "overburden" (cookies), using highly "expensive" tools (toolpicks).

As a seasoned teacher of eighteen years, I routinely use our current vocabulary words throughout the day to model our words. This guidance is helpful, as research indicates students need to hear a new vocabulary word used 8-12 times to retain it and add it to their vocabularies. We were intrepid learners and paleontologists today in Flex Reading. Undoubtedly this is one of my favorite learning activities of the year, but you will have to ask your student their opinion (later next week, we will be learning about facts and opinions).  Students were encouraged to make sure their fossils were pristine from dirt. They were told the overburden example they were given was fragile. In the real world, paleontologists wouldn't be able to hoist their sample, because it would be too heavy. It is a privilege to read interesting books and experience simulations of what we are reading with a little imagination and delectable learning materials. I hope these will be the memories my students cherish from their fourth grade experience!

In the end, students were asked to throw out their excavation site. They munched on a cookie as we talked about at a real excavation site, paleontologists often work in extreme heat, sun, and other weather conditions for long hours and sometimes years at a time for one excavation. The fossils are priceless, created over hundreds of thousands of years, and if one is broken, it can not be replaced. In the coming weeks, we will be learning about what we thought we know about dinosaurs, were really only guesses (we don't really know what color dinosaurs were, we've never found skin to know for sure). The BEST part of our learning experience, is when we travel to the Science Museum of Minnesota on our fourth grade field trip and get to see the dinosaur replicas on display. Let the excavation of learning begin!!