Prehistoric animals
Prehistoric animals moon shoot game
Science moon shoot game is a game for one player when self-testing skills or many players of in a classroom. Each player enters his/her name on their rocket and before launch. Answer questions as the rockets rise. If you answer a question incorrectly, you lose a chance and your rocket is hit by a meteorite. The winner is the student who answers the most questions.
Learn about prehistoric animals ( dinosaurs, mammoth etc) , names, diets, reproduction, era of existence etc. This game is for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade children.
Prehistoric Animals
Long before humans roamed the earth, the planet was full of strange and wonderful creatures. Some of them were the biggest animals that have ever lived, and others were much bigger versions of what we already have, centipedes that were three metres long, or a dragonfly half a metre long. Prehistoric animals lived millions of years ago when the world was unrecognizable to how it is today, the continents we have today didn’t exist, the world was one big piece of land where prehistoric animals would roam, and then it started to break up and drift across the oceans to form what we have now. In this lesson we will look at some of the best prehistoric animals.
T-Rex – The famous dinosaur that everyone knows, and not just from Toy Story. T-Rex lived 70-65 million years ago and used to walk upright on its two strong legs, but had short, weaker arms. T-Rex had a very strong bite, similar to that of alligators.
Megalodon – Megalodons were giant sharks that could reach 30 metres long! They had sharp 7-inch teeth and a powerful bite; they could chomp through the skull of a prehistoric whale as easy as us biting into a grape.
Archaeopteryx – This was the first prehistoric animal found that had both traits of dinosaurs and traits of birds. It had a face like a dinosaur but feathers like a bird, but we’re not yet sure if it could properly fly or just glide. It helped us figure out that birds descended from small dinosaurs.
Sea Scorpions – some species of Sea Scorpions were 2.5-3 metres long and would crawl about the sea floor picking up its prey with it’s pincers or hiding on the sea floor and waiting for something to swim over it and sting them with it’s tail.
Woolly Mammoth – Woolly Mammoths looked a bit like elephants only much bigger and with fur. They went extinct around 9,000 years ago, but after the last ice age. It is thought that one of the main reasons they went extinct is that they were hunted by prehistoric cave men for food.
Smilodon – This was a type of sabre-toothed cat, and the last one that would have existed at the same time as humans. Like Woolly Mammoths they survived until the end of the ice age.
Dire Wolves – Dire Wolves were similar to Grey Wolves but much bigger, heavier and with larger teeth.
Neanderthals – Neanderthals were very much like modern humans. They were shorter, but much more robust because their bones were a lot stronger. They, like us, had language and families and art, however they lacked imagination and only lived in small groups. It’s thought that we lived alongside them for thousands of years once modern humans migrated into Europe, which is where Neanderthals lived. Unfortunately they became extinct, probably because we were killing the food they eat and eating it ourselves, meaning they often went hungry.
Brachiosaurus – Brachiosaurus’ were one of the largest dinosaurs to ever live and weighed around 30 tons. They were vegetarians, eating tall plants and would have to eat plants all day long because they were so big! They had long necks and long tails and a large body.
Terror Bird – Terror Birds were birds that couldn’t fly, but roamed the land ‘terrorising’ its prey. They could be 3 metres tall, and would eat mammals, their favourite mammals to eat were horses, but they would also eat small mammals too.
Learn about Prehistoric Animals - Teaching Tips For Instructors
- Use Drawings of the animals so that the kids can see what they looked like.
- For the animals that are particularly large, find a scaled drawing showing the size of the animal compared to a human, these exist all over the internet.
- Relate the animals to animals they already know or have seen in popular culture, for example Woolly Mammoths and Sabre Tooth Tigers both appear in the popular children’s movie “Ice Age”. For Neanderthals you can compare them to cave men, Sea Scorpions and Megalodon are a little easier because they look very similar to their descendants today only much bigger.
- Engage the children by encouraging to pick their favourite one, describe why, and draw a picture of it.
- If you have the time, watching an episode of “Walking with Dinosaurs”/”Walking with Monsters”/”Walking with Beasts” can help the children know what life was like for these animals. There are episodes on Sea Scorpions, T-Rex, Brachiosaurs, Megalodon and Neanderthals, which are easy to find on YouTube.
