At a glance
Paleontology is a three-visit project of 60 minutes each that takes students in kindergarten, grade 1, grade 3 and grade 5 back in time: dinosaurs, fossils, then rocks and minerals.
Students dig for dinosaur footprints, seashell fossils hundreds of millions of years old, rocks such as basalt and minerals such as gold. They describe the major stages of Earth’s history and sort the three great families of rocks.
Climb aboard our time machine!
Over 3 workshops, we dig into the ground to uncover all kinds of treasures: dinosaur footprints, seashell fossils hundreds of millions of years old, rocks such as basalt and minerals such as gold!
Come dig into the history of planet Earth with us!
How it runs:
Visit 1: Dinosaurs (60 minutes).
Visit 2: Fossils (60 minutes).
Visit 3: Rocks and minerals (60 minutes).
Learning goals (elementary)
- Describe the major stages in the history of the Earth and its living things.
- Know and classify the three main families of rocks (sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic).
- Classify rocks by their properties (layers, crystal size) and minerals by theirs (colour, crystal shape, hardness, reaction to acid).
- Place the appearance and extinction of the dinosaurs on a timeline.
- Link parts of a dinosaur’s anatomy to their function (defence, diet, communication, courtship).
- Describe how fossils form, compared with how a rock forms.
- Make a fossil imprint to take home.
