Junior Level Activities

Fossils

• Make your own 'fossils'. Pour a mix of plaster of paris into cardboard or aluminium pie pans. Press in small objects such as shells, leaves, twigs, seeds, fingers, etc. Remove them as the plaster hardens. Make animal tracks; have others try to guess what the fossils are that you have made. N.B. Dental plaster sets in about 20 minutes and isn't expensive to buy.

• Boil a chicken long enough for the meat to become easy to strip revealing the skeleton. Identify key features: femur tibia/fibula, breast/sternum, wishbone/furcula, vertebrae, ribs. Prepare the skeleton for display and labelling by drying it out in an oven. Borrow a human/animal skeleton from a local secondary school to reinforce bone names.

Dinosaurs

• Present a project on a dinosaur of your choice. Include the following information:
  • What is the dinosaur's name?
  • What does the name mean?
  • How long ago did this animal live?
  • In what parts of the world have fossils of this dinosaur been found?
  • How big was it?
  • What did it eat?
  • How did it protect itself?
  • How many legs did it walk upon?
  • What is interesting about this dinosaur?
  • Draw a picture of what this animal might have looked like.

• Interview your favourite dinosaur.

• If a palaeontologist finds a femur (thigh bone) of a dinosaur, they can calculate the approximate height of the dinosaur by multiplying by five. Try this by multiplying your own femur length by five, and compare with your height.

• Choose a large sauropod, eg. Mamenchisaurus. Draw its outline in the school ground with chalk.

• Make some dinosaur footprints to cover a wallpaper display. Cut a positive/negative from potato halves. Print in an orderly pattern. Did your dinosaur have 2 or 4 legs? Was your dinosaur walking or running?

• Build some wire and wood models of dinosaurs to illustrate the different body forms, and to illustrate posture differences and symmetry of balance. Some of these models could then be extended to become the base for paper mache models. This is a suitable project for small groups.

• Using plastic dinosaur models, create your own 'Jurassic Park'. What sorts of plants dominated the environment during the era of the dinosaurs? Create a dinosaur nest with the models using sugared almonds as eggs.