Prehistory – Part 6 Ordovician and Silurian Periods

This week we learned about the Ordovician and Silurian Periods in Prehistory.    I combined these two periods because they were covered together in our Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History and our Usborne First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life.    That and making cooksonia was the only craft/activity I could come up with (and I actually didn't even come up with that one - Angela at Satori Smiles did).  The creatures are starting to get more complicated and I am not at all artistic.

As usual, we started with going over our Charlie’s Playhouse Creature Cards and comparing them to our timeline.  I did separate the periods for this activity.  Georgie loves picking out critters from the timeline, reading what the timeline says, then learning more about them from the Creature Cards.  As we move on to reading in our encyclopedias, he’s been really good about recognizing creatures that appear on our timeline.

In our UILEWH they have pictures of two other spore-bearing plants besides Cooksonia – Aglaophyton and Rhynia.  Since they were similar to, but different colors from, cooksonia I let the kids pick what color they wanted to use to make models.  I did tell them to make each plant one color but their creativity took over. 

I thought it might frustrate them if the pompoms wouldn’t stay on the tips of the pipe cleaners well so I twisted the pipe cleaners into small loops to make a platform for the pompoms.   Once again the kids did their own thing and glued the pompoms on to completely different places.   They actually didn’t like this activity too much.  Georgie thought it was too messy since the glue kept running down his hand.  I stuck the pipe cleaners in straws to hold them upright and gave them cups to stick them in so they wouldn’t have to hold them but….


What they did enjoy was swiping a bunch of straws and joining them together into swords.  I have a huge bin of neon colored straws and pipe cleaners that I believe I purchased to use for color matching activities.  Since we are past that point, I guess I can let them be creative with them.

We looked at some web links with animations of Silurian creatures and watched Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters on Netflix.  Not everything on the video matched our current time period and we will probably watch it again in a few weeks.

We read the book When Fish Got Feet, Sharks Got Teeth and Bugs Began to Swarm and The Usborne Great Dinosaur Search.  The dinosaur search book actually starts with the Silurian period and we only covered that page but Georgie really enjoyed it.  He loves I-Spy type books and computer games.  I may have to buy this book since it’s already over-due from the library.



In getting these pictures from Amazon, I realized there is a whole collection of these books, they are only $7.99 to $9.99 each and they are part of a 3-for the price of 4 promotion.  Cool.