Mistery Skull

A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Banks found the skull of an animal in her BBQ. She thought it might be the skull of a squirrel. We borrowed it and showed it to the children.  We let them look at it and guess what it was.

 

During circle time, we shared what we thought it was.  Here is our discussion:

What do your think it is?

Joanna-Lee: A dinosaur.
Colin: I think it is a bird bone.
Alessa: A T-Rex.
Tammy: A horse.
Kaitlyn: A dinosaur.
Aiden: T-Rex bone, see head, eyes.
Kaitlyn: A frog.

What kind of bone is it?

Colin: A head.
Ella: A dinosaur head.

It is a bone that is part of a head.  How can we tell it is the bone from a head?

Ella:  Because one time I saw a dinosaur movie and it was the one of a small dinosaur.

Do you know what we call the head bone?

Ella: It is called a skull.

What helps us say it is a skull?

Sean: It got teeth in it.
And it also has holes where were the eyes.

We told the children that Mrs. Banks thought it was the skull of a squirrel that might have gone in the BBQ to stay warm during winter and could not get out.  We told the children that we would look at pictures of skulls to try to determine which animal it belong to.

Yesterday, we decided to have the children look on Mrs. Cole iPad to compare pictures of skulls with our skull. Before we started, we decided to have a discussion to eliminate some of our guesses.

We eliminated the suggestions that it might be a dinosaur skull because dinosaur bone are "found underground (Giuliana M.)" and not in a BBQ. We decided that it was not a horse skull as the "horse is too big to fit in a BBQ (Ella)."  We were uncertain about a bird or a frog as our first thought was that they do not have teeth.  We decided to check that fact and to eliminate them if they do not have teeth. 

James, Sean, Antonio, Joanna-Lee and Mrs. Cole discovered that frog do have teeth but not birds.  Their next step was to look at pictures of a squirrel and frog skulls. They found out that their eye sockets were similar in size but not position in the same place. The skull of a squirrel is rounder than the one of a frog.  Both skulls showed teeth. 

Skull from a frog.

Skull from a squirrel.