Evolution Part 1

Recently I have had loads of difficult questions from the children such as "How did apes turn into people?", and "Were monsters alive when dinosaurs were?". So I decided to try out this unit study on evolution from Intellego Unit Studies. So far the children and I are pretty impressed.

The first part is about palaeontology. First we talked about what we already know and what we want to find out.

By R

By L

We then followed some links in the curriculum to read up on fossils and palaeontology. We also , watched some videos. We then found out a bit about diversity. This involved some new vocabulary.

By R

By R

 Next we went outside to see how diverse life is in our garden.

By R

By L

We then explored the house for evidence of life (or things that had once been alive). Our nature table, fridge and food cupboards contained lots of diversity.

By R

By L

Next we watched some videos about palaeontologists. We talked about how collecting fossils and interpreting them can be like doing a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing. So next we made a jigsaw, took out some of the pieces, buried it, and then dug it up again.

 Diplodocus puzzle by L

Stegosaurus puzzle by R

Burying the puzzles

Excavating the "fossils"

The children then had to put the puzzles back together and add their interpretations for the missing sections.

We're only a short way in to the unit study so stay tuned for more...