The Little Palaeontologists (LS-RO-283)

Dinosaurs are the largest animals that lived on Earth, millions of years ago. Although they have completely lost about 60 million years ago, these reptiles continue to fascinate us.

All students want to know more things about dinosaurs. Through this lesson, students will travel in a magical world, in an immemorial time, with fantastic characters. A special emphasis will be placed on the scientific content, and by putting them in the position of little palaeontologists, students will develop their imagination and stimulate their curiosity in order to discover the secrets of a disappeared world.

This  didactic scenario was created  by Dorina Marin from Romania was structured in three main activities:

A brief introduction to Europeana Collections and conditions of use of the platform

a) Stimulating children’s interest in different species of dinosaurs that have lived on earth;

b) Presenting the Europeana platform, the existing materials on the platform, especially in the field of natural sciences and conditions of use.

Explanation of the scientific content

a) Study of several pictures with different dinosaurs.

b) Starting from a set of questions, supported by a PowerPoint presentation, students will actively participate in obtaining information on the time period in which dinosaurs appeared and disappeared, the appearance and way of life of dinosaurs, the similarities between dinosaurs and reptiles, the physical characteristics of the dinosaurs, number of species discovered, the dinosaurs living environment, food, species, theories of scientists regarding the disappearance of dinosaurs.

c) Questions – problem about appearance, adaptation to the environment and disappearance of dinosaurs.

Stimulating curiosity and achieving performance 

Mystery Bones Activity: An interactive activity with small groups of 4 explorers who, guided by a teacher, will reconstruct the body of the dinosaurs based on bones discovered in the ground.

The didactic activity has a positive impact because the students were very excited about the possibility of becoming palaeontologists and of reconstructing the initial shape of the dinosaur body discovered. Finally, they came up with the idea of ​​comparing their research with the virtual images offered by the Mozaik 3D mobile phone application.

Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:

Did you find this learning scenario interesting? You might also like:

• Biodiversity Explorers
• Exploring natural science and natural history museums
• Europeana living museum

The featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana Collections and belongs to the public domain.