Trip to the Dinosaur Museum! 28.2.20

Trip to the Dinosaur Museum! 28.2.20

On Wednesday we went to visit the Dinosaur Museum as a learning capture for our new topic. We travelled on the minibus into Dorchester, getting very excited looking out the window and seeing the sprinkling of snow on the hills! 
When we got to the museum we met the museum curator, who introduced us to the prehistoric era and told us all about the first dinosaur skeleton, the Megalosaurus! We studied various dinosaur footprints and noticed the marks where it's tail had trailed behind the footprints. We learnt that fossils are the preserved remains, marks or trace of a living thing from a past geological age. We got to hold pieces of fossilised tree and dinosaur bone. The fossilised bone was very heavy!! We could see lots of patterns and shapes. We listened carefully to the curator and thought of some of our own questions to ask. We wanted to know about where the dinosaurs came from, where their babies come from and what they ate.

On our visit around the museum we learnt about how fossils can be collected and saw lots of ammonites that had been found along the Jurassic coast. Many had been found by Mary Anning, a British fossil collector and palaeontologist who became famous around the world for her discoveries along Lyme Regis. We enjoyed exploring the museum, walking among the dinosaur skeletons and life-size reconstructions of the Stegosaurus and T-Rex!  We pretended to be palaeontologists, digging in the excavation pit and finding dinosaur bones underneath the sand! We enjoyed the feely boxes, touching dinosaur teeth, heads, skin and even smelling T-Rex breath!! We used the iPad games to complete puzzles and to explore what colours dinosaurs may have been. We also saw fossilised eggs from various creatures, some from dinosaurs! We saw a model of a baby dinosaur curled up inside an egg. We learnt that baby dinosaurs hatch from eggs, when they first hatched they were very small and needed to be looked after carefully. They then grew quickly, enabling them to be safe from predators like the T-Rex; otherwise known as the King of the dinosaurs!

We had a very busy morning, learning lots of new facts about dinosaurs, where they lived and how people have been able to find out so much about them. Before heading back to school we sat together and had our snack. We talked about our favourite things at the museum and the most exciting facts! We watched a short part of the film in the cinema room, watching animated recreations of dinosaurs roaming around the earth. 

Everyone was very excited and showed lots of enthusiasm. We are hoping this trip has sparked the children's interests and inspired them to find out more about these exciting and sometimes dangerous prehistoric creatures!