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Meadows Day Nursery case study: exploring dinosaurs
Meadows Day Nursery has exceptional practice in communication, language and literacy.
This is exemplified in the recent dinosaur theme, developed from the children’s interest in
dinosaurs. Children love the dinosaur names and can name a wide variety of dinosaurs,
talk knowledgeably about dinosaurs and cavemen and come up with their own ideas about
life as a caveman.
The role play area is a cave where dinosaurs and cavemen could live complete with a wall
of cave paintings done by the children using charcoal. The cave painting allows children to
participate at their own level and ranges from simple mark making to recognisable
dinosaur pictures. The children enjoy using the different material to draw with and knew it
came from fire. Practitioners are thinking how to extend this to children seeing charcoal
made at Forest School.
We made cave paintings in our cave, the charcoal made our hands black
Children are helped to think how the cavemen lived without modern appliances. When one
girl was asked how the caveman would wash the charcoal off his hands without soap or
running water, she suggested he might use leaves to clean his hands.
The children enjoy sharing a range of factual and story books relating to dinosaurs and
relish repeating the words in their favourite dinosaur rhyme, especially the rhyming words.
The rhyme is displayed alongside the children’s own drawings of dinosaurs, where some
children are able to copy the dinosaur names and others make credible attempts at letters.
This is our favourite dinosaur
rhyme, we drew pictures of how
our favourite dinosaurs might
look. They have very long
names, my favourite is
Tyrannosaurus.
The children are also ‘hatching’ a dinosaur egg in water and are excitedly watching each
day to see if there is any progress.
We are waiting for our egg to hatch, there will be a baby dinosaur inside
Outside there are dinosaurs in the water tray selected by children as ones that like water.
There is also a tray with different environments for dinosaurs including snow, sand and
forest where children have to negotiate with each other to enter a different dinosaur land.
The nursery has been working on helping children to think about describing words and
the quality of language used was exceptional. Children are able to describe numerous
dinosaur characteristics as well as carry out rich play in their different dinosaur worlds.
My dinosaur lives in the forest, he likes to eat trees
My dinosaur likes to live in the water because he can swim, he catches fish and
has a very long tail and sharp teeth