Fossils and not fossils

Can you tell the difference between a trace fossil and a body fossil? Hmm can you? Can you? Well T can! Body fossils being actual bits of body and trace fossils being stuff left behind by the thing that created the body fossil! So I googled images of trace and body fossils and printed them out. During my googling I came across a fab body fossil on Christian answers .net.........feck me what a load of tripe! It goes on about dinosaurs being on noah's ark.....no really and cites the proof as being that it doesn't say in the bible that they weren't.?????? Oh and it also challenges the dating of dinosaurs......coz loads of ancient human writings talk about t-rex's.....don't they? I was gobsmacked that people would tell their kids this. Admittedly be open minded but plain stark raving bonkers???? really! Anyways the pic was good so I printed out a load of pictures of different fossils ready for T to sort and stick in his Dinosaurs folder. Then we had a go at creating a fossil, now admittedly it wasn't gonna be 80 million yrs old more like 38 hours and created in our kitchen but we still had fun. We created trace fossils of dino foot print fossils with toy dinosaurs (T rex and Brachiasaurus so both veggies and meaties were equally represented!) clay, sugar and water. First we dinosaurs left footprints in the soft clay of the river bed. Then we covered the clay bed with a thick sludgey sediment (sugar and water) and then we left the sediment to settle so most of the water could be sucked off and then left it till the sugar hardened off.

Obviously this required daily prodding and finger sucking to "check" whether the sugar had set yet! But when it finally had T was finally allowed to take a hammer and one of Daddy's screwdrivers to it and chip away at the sugar until the clay bed was revealed. Once the clay was visible we used a brush to remove the loose (and slightly soggy) sugar and soon we were able to see the footprints. Oh then the fun really started as silly Mummy in her wisdom had run the hot tap on the sugar at the beginning of the exercise, by mistake, so a few of the footprints were filled by a rather lovely hardened sugar syrup but they were still very clearly visible and very clearly footprints!

First, like the true scientists we are we measured the foot prints.......Oh, I hear you cry,to estimate the size of the beast that encountered your cunning clay bed........noooooooo T is only 4 ffs we measured them coz if we wanted to we could estimate the size but we didn't want to we just wanted to know how big our t-rex and brachi's feet were....and they were 2.5am and 1.5cms respectively. So, then it was off to the sink to test the theory that sugar is water soluble and running water on to the crystallized syrup should shift it! Hampered only by the slight problem that the clay is also water soluble. Fortunately I was semi-confident that the sugar would dissolve before the clay did and thankfully I was right......note the cunning use of Daddy's pastry brush which was cleaned and returned to the drawer before any complaints could be made! Voila! A gorgeous replica of what trace fossils in the form of dinosaur foot prints might look like if dinosaurs were only 12 cms tall and had once lived in my kitchen!

......And if you could just ignore the two footprints that are still filled with sugar syrup that would be fab.......didn't want to test my clay versus sugar too much and T was getting a teeny bit heavy handed with the pastry brush!!!

Natural History Museum

"Ah look he ish shmilink at uss"

23rd of Jan saw a jolly up to London for to see the dinosaurs! South west trains did a sterling job of delaying us by telling us of the signal failure at Clapham just after we had pulled away from woking station where we could have changed ARGGGGGGGHHHH. Never mind tho we made it just on time and met up with the other home edders under the diplodocus's head. First was the battle of the picnic table in the basement with possibly every school child in Britain vying for a table, then it was off to Dino Jaws. S had secured us an Ed disc which was fab coz it only cost us £3 to get in as opposed to the £21 it would have cost without the disc. Quite a good exhibit, quite short but worth a butchers! I would have been a little miffed if we had paid full price as some of the touch screen stuff didn't work and the interactive stuff was a bit random *so thanks again to S* but on the whole lots of animatronic dinosaurs including feathered velociraptors and dino poo! The kids had a ball rampaging round the museum and Sp and T were thick as thieves and had great fun play fighting. I loved that none of the kids seemed even the slightest bit perturbed by dinosaur heads poking out of a black screen, half skeletal, half flesh...........

I wanted T to get a feeling for the scale of them which I think he did.....not that you can tell what goes in or indeed goes on in the head of a 4 nearly 5 yr old boy!

This one was behind a screen warning us that younger and more sensitive patrons might find it frightening.....

I was expecting blood, gore, perhaps even mild sexual references but no....its a small dinosaur with a floppy lizard in its mouth....as you can tell T was PETRIFIED!!!!!!!! (although the floppy lizard did make it look very lifelike!)

Then it was off to the skeleton bit where we wandered around looking at the casts of fossilised dino bones.

H and T giving a lovely demo of what big buggers the dinos were!!!! Then it was off to have a gawp at the T-rex which was according to the museum a teenage size T-rex....wouldn't like to be around for his stroppy tantrums! So all in all a good day, really illustrated the size of the dinosaurs and gave a interesting adventure to add to our dinosaur project.

Dinosaurs-r-us!

So Dinosaurs are our project at the mo and the house is filled to the brim with all things dino. I found a scheme of work on the web for KS1 (well grade one in America so I'm assuming near enough the same) It is very american talking about "encountering the idea" and experiencing the idea" *puke* but a good frame work to dip in and out of and the teacher in me loves the structure!!! Our home education is about as autonomous as a control freak like me can manage! So we started a few days after xmyth with T using one of the Dino books he got that was Internet linked. He had a shufie round some of the links and spent a good hour watching mini video clips on the National Geographic website and playing a couple of dinosaur based games included in the Usborne internet linked books.

One of the first tasks on the SOW was to make rice pictures of dinosaurs, cue me cutting out seriously stiff cardboard (which hurts) to make dino templates. The I got little glass jars. half filled them with rice then added a few drops of food colouring and shook them like billio! Then it was just a case of using them like glitter - spread the glue and shake on the rice! Not a bad out come really ! Although it did take an over spray with glue to keep the rice in place.

So idea fully encountered *raises eyebrow* we went on to dinosaur characteristics. We had a few plaggy dinosaurs lying around but defiantly needed more so we borrowed some from B next door. We then split the dinosaurs into groups; Carnivore, herbivore, biped, quadraped etc. I initially asked T to split them into land, air and water until we discovered that dinosaurs only lived on land , the others are prehistoric reptiles!!!! Well even with a total of 13 dinosaurs it was clear we needed more so off we went into town and thanks to the ELC and Natural World sale, came back with 40 mini dinosaurs, 10 dino babies, a braciosaurus and a T-rex as well as a remote controlled T-rex (never ever taking my bro on a shopping trip again) some dinosaur bones to assemble and a dinosaur sticker book, phew!

Now this is where the ex-teacher in me rears its head! AND THUS THE WALL DISPLAY WAS BORN!!!! You have to admit it is pretty impressive! And serves as a constant reminder of our topic!!! Needless to say I bored of cutting out the fiddly little feckers after about five minutes but T loved sorting and sticking his dinos and using the sticker book to add more to the different categories. He even caught me out on a couple of dinosaurs, I assumed one of the mean looking ones was a meat eater but no, apparently just coz it has an evil glint in its eye its not necessarily a carnivore!

We then had a few chats about how many dinosaurs there are around today, ie zero none nada! and how long ago they lived which is a really tough concept to get a wee ones head around. We then talked about why they might had died and what other areas we were going to cover in the project. All in all a good start although I am SICK OF TREADING ON PLASTIC DINOSAURS!!!! they really bloody hurt and are far too spiky IMO!

The cold wind will blow and we shall have snow!

Woken up at seven thirtyish this morning to T telling us we HAD to look outside. Didn't for a second expect snow but there it was!!!! And a decent amount!!! So after a phonecall from B to say that he couldn;t get through to come and have the boys, I called into work and we had an official SNOW DAY!!!!! Wooooooo

So first there was the obligatory wrapping boys up like michelin men! The youngest one got the most padding!

Then it was snowman time.

T was out there like a shot and had half the grass clear before L had even got his coat on. Have to say the waterproof dungarees we bought from www.waterproofworld.com are fan-bloody-tastic! L got waterproofed as well as did I so the wet bits were limited!

Then it was off to the dog walk to use the sledge we bought about 3 yrs ago! Not that easy wrestling 2 michelin'd kids and a stoopid dog AND a sledge but we managed and L was totally knackered on the way home bless him. He sobbed and fell asleep as soon as I got him upstairs. But he LOVED Sledging with T....not sure T was that keen on the sharing. I wasn't that keen on the amount of dog poo but that will be a side effect of a dog walk! L face planted a couple of times but that didn't stop him!