Georges Cuvier and the Mosasaur

In our Year 4 assembly today we performed a play about the French scientist Georges Cuvier, and the dramatic discovery that giant reptiles once filled the land, seas and skies.

Up until this time people had not realised that there were many extinct animals that were very different to the animals alive now.

The one Georges Cuvier studied we now call a Mosasaur. It was a huge carnivorous sea reptile. It's the "Sea rex" we mentioned earlier.

This is the play again, this time as a slide-and-sound show:



Here, again, is the documentary film about the Mosasaur that we watched some of:

Investigating our own number patterns

Today we made mathematical patterns in the Year 4 classrooms. Tomorrow we will try to work out the numbers involved...

Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier was one of the first scientists to realise that the earth had once been full of enormous reptiles.

Before that, people had thought that the only animals to have lived on earth are the ones that are alive now.

He got to know the skeletons of many animals really well, so when he saw a new skeleton, he knew whihc ones it was most like.

We watched the first few minutes of this film, Sea Rex, to see how one fossil, changed the way we see the history of our planet. You might like to see more of it:

Assembly

Don't forget that there is a Year 4 assembly NEXT FRIDAY! 

That's Friday 27th September at 8.40. 

We hope lots of mums and dads can come.

See you there!

 

 

 

Dinosaur Museum

Here are a few photos from our trip to the museum at Esperaza - we all had a GRRRRRREAT time!

How big is a million? How far back to the dinosaurs?

We've been talking about the dinosaurs in Year 4, which has involved us in some pretty big numbers. For instance, the last dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

It's hard enough picturing a thousand; a million is a thousand thousand!

So, to get to grips with this, we've been visualising a million:

This video / book is also good for visualising a million:



In our corridor we have a timeline that goes from 2000 at one end to zero at the other, the time when Jesus was born:

What if that timeline went back beyond the year "0", all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs?

How far do you think it would go?

One last thing for getting an idea of scaling up in tens: have a look at the site Powers of Ten.

Goodbye Isabel!

It was Isabel's last day on Friday. We took this picture to put in the card we gave her, full of all our good wishes for her move back to Spain.

Pebble Questions

We each brought a pebble to school. Here are some of the questions we came up with to ask about our pebbles.

We've used a microscope to look closer at each pebble.




For guidance, we had the "Seven Ws" in mind:

Take a line for a walk...

4B took a line for a walk too...

Take a line for a walk

Here is the finished art work by children in 4G - click on an image to see it bigger: