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Illustrations by Claire Ewart
HarperCollins, 1991
Summary: The Rocky Mountain Unlimited transports Miss Pym's class back through time to the age of the dinosaurs.
Level: Easy Picture Book, K - 4
Themes:
- Dinosaurs
Time travel
Scientific method
Fossils
Extinction.
Activities:
1. List the clues as they occur that show the train is travelling back in time. (New York: clothes, modern building; Philadelphia: lady on horseback, carriages and automobiles, clothing and accessories, uncluttered city skyline; Pittsburgh: officers in Civil War uniforms; Ohio: buffaloes, steam locomotive, no cities; nightfall: woolly mammoth, snow and glacial ice; morning: ferns, dragonflies; afternoon: swamp, tall trees, footprints, and finally the dinosaurs).
a. Make a time line of the train trip. Use the time line on a CD-ROM encyclopedia like Grolier's or other history source books to identify the time periods from the clues. (Early 1900's; 1860's, early 1800's, the Ice Age, the Jurassic and Triassic Eras). Be as general or specific as fits the needs and capabilities of the class.
b. Plan another class trip back in time on the Rocky Mountain Unlimited. Divide the class into small groups. Have each group choose a time period to visit. Research and discuss the events and characteristics of everyday life for each period. Have each group write postcards telling the folks back home about their trip or create a skit to dramatize their stop on the time train trip. Arrange the group's choices chronologically for presentation to the whole class or school.
c. Find some Calvin and Hobbes comic strips about Calvin's Transmogrifier / Time Machine. (Journal Tribune , July 11 - 16, 1994). Make a Time Machine from a large cardboard box. Draw comic strip pictures of your time trip.
d. Compare and contrast the trip through time with Lyon's Who Cane Down that Road? List the feelings that each book evokes.
2. Dinosaurs are divided into two major groups, the plant eaters and the meat eaters. Divide the class into small groups. Assign each group a dinosaur. Have each group do research to determine the appearance of their dinosaur and whether it is a plant eater or a meat eater. There are many other facts that could be researched, such as size, geographic distribution, geological era, habits, distinctive body traits, interesting features, etc. Ask the class what fields are important. Make a simple computer database comparing these characteristics. Then ask other students to use and evaluate it.
a. Using a book like How to Make Super Pop-ups by Joan Irvine, make pop-up cards or pop-up masks of a plant eating dinosaur and a meat-eating one. Play a sorting game by feeding each dinosaur the appropriate foods.
b. Irvine's book also gives directions for making pop-up stairs (see "Make a Birthday Cake"). Play a sequencing game by placing dinosaur cut outs and other later forms of animal life on the stairs from earliest living species to latest. A step ladder could also be used to illustrate the sequencing. (Refer to a chart of the geological eras such as the one in Aliki's book, Dinosaur Bones or John Stidworthy's More Science Projects: Fossils ).
3a. Jack Prelutsky's poems in Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast and Bernard Most's rewritten nursery rhymes in Four & Twenty Dinosaurs can easily be used as finger plays for the youngest dinosaur enthusiasts. ("One, two three, four, five, I caught an Allosaurus alive! Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, I let it go again. Why did you let it go? Because it bit my finger so! Which finger did it bite? The little finger on the right.")
b. Use the tutorial on the Apple System disk, "Getting Down to BASIC," to write simple dinosaur poems and to understand using line numbers and the PRINT, RUN, LIST, CAT, SAVE and LOAD commands in Applesoft BASIC.
4. Dinosaur jokes and riddles are fun, too. Laugh with David Adler in The Dinosaur Princess and Other Prehistoric Riddles or Colossal Fossils compiled by Charles Keller, ("Did Tyrannosaurus Rex entertain a lot? Sure. He always had friends for lunch.").
5. Miss Pym's students used part of the scientific method to study the dinosaurs. Use a dictionary to identify steps in the scientific method. ("Recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."). What evidence can you find of the students in Time Train using the scientific method? (Studying stegosaurus eating habits, taking notes, and taking photographs). Read Dinosaur Bones by Aliki. Discuss how scientists revised their theories about dinosaurs. One example is the iguanodon's thumb which was first thought to be a horn. Another is "the great brontosaurus hoax" in the Eyewitness Book Dinosaur. Find out what the brontosaurus' real name is. (Apatosaurus).
6. Digging Up Dinosaurs by Aliki and I Can Be An Archaeologist by Robert B. Pickering explain how scientists discover and use fossils to find out about dinosaurs. Paulette Morin of Millennium Technologies, Inc. in her multi-media presentation "Having Fun With Dinosaurs and Fossils" tells kids how to find their own fossils. Make a list of items to put in a knapsack for a fossil hunter's field kit: a small shovel or spade, a brush, a ruler or measuring tape, a notebook, drawing paper and a pencil, gloves and goggles and soft material or small boxes to pack fossils. Discuss the uses of each item.
a.. A simple experiment illustrates how the rock layers containing fossils are formed. Put some soil in a jar. Add some sand; then some water. Tighten the lid. Shake vigorously. Watch the suspended particles settle. Observe the resulting layers. Read More Science Projects: Fossils by John Stidworthy for more information.
b. Go on a fossil hunt. See Stidworthy's book for likely sites. When you find a fossil, record your data. Use your notebook to describe what you found. Draw a picture of how it looked. Make a map of where you found it. Wrap it carefully and take it to a museum to show to an expert. Read Kathryn Lasky's Dinosaur Dig about a family's fossil hunting trip n the Badlands of Montana. Contact the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 55 Capitol Street, Augusta, 207 - 287 - 2132 or the Maine Archeological Society, P.O. Box 982, Augusta, 04332 for information about archeological digs in Maine. Read about a dig for Indian artifacts at the Great Falls Dam in Windham in the Portland Press Herald, Monday, July 18, 1994.
c. If a real fossil hunt is not possible, plan a simulated hunt. Make fossil skeletons from flour dough, clay or plaster. Many recipes are found in Mudworks: Creative Clay, Dough and Modeling Experiences by Mary Ann Kohl. Bury the skeletons. Have the students excavate the fossils and record their data using their fossil hunter's field kits. If an outdoor area like a beach or field is used, discuss in advance the perimeters of the "dig" and ways to ensure that the area will not be permanently disturbed by this activity. If an outdoor area is not available, consider using a sandbox.
7. The Rocky Mounted Unlimited took Miss Pym's class to Utah. Bernard Most's book, Where to Look for a Dinosaur tells about dinosaur fossils found in other places all over the world and has some great ideas for dinosaur art projects: make a giant floor map of the world placing student drawings on the appropriate continents; play a matching game of country flags and dinosaurs; use an adding machine tape or pin-feed computer paper to draw dinosaur pictures on a "Great Wall of China" around the room.
b. One of the museums listed at the back of Most's book is Dinosaur National Monument, the original destination of Miss Pym's class. Write for more information about their dinosaur exhibits and what it would really be like to visit Dinosaur National Monument in Jensen, Utah today.
8. In Time Train the children make friends with the dinosaurs. Have the children tell what they did together. (They played ball, went swimming, flying and riding on the dinosaurs' backs). Your Pet Dinosaur by Dr. Rex as told to and illustrated by Hudson Talbott is a guide to choosing a pet dinosaur. Have the students draw a picture or write a story about what they would do with a dinosaur. Encourage them to think about where their dinosaurs would sleep, what they would eat, etc. Several of the many dinosaur picture books which would feed the imagination for this exercise are: If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most, Count-a-Saurus by Nancy Blumenthal, The Dinosaur Who Lived in My Backyard by B.G. Hennessey, Mrs. Toggle and the Dinosaur by Robin Pulver and Katie and the Dinosaurs by James Mayhew.
9. Drawing Dinosaurs by Jerome Goyallon is a wonderful resource for dinosaur facts and helpful techniques for dinosaur artists. The charts on pp. 48 and 49 are excellent illustrations of the geologic time scale and the evolution of vertebrates. Instructions on how to make grids, key points and guiding lines make it easy to draw many types of dinosaurs.
10. The soccer playing dinosaur in Time Train looks like the Ornitholstes in Gail Gibbons Dinosaurs. The little dinosaurs are not as well known as the bigger species. Use a flannel board to arrange some dinosaurs by size. Include the little chicken-like Compsognathus, the three foot long Heterodontosaurus, the Protoceratops which was only about six feet long and as tall as a large dog as well as the big Iguanodon and Anatosaurus, and the huge Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Recently bones have been found for dinosaurs which may have been one third larger than Brachiosaurus. They have been named Supersaurus and Ultrasaurus! (Sources: Eyewitness Book Dinosaur, Most's books have good silhouettes for patterns).
11. Paleontologists, scientists who study fossils to learn about ancient life forms, have different theories about why the dinosaurs became extinct. Read about some of their theories in Gail Gibbon's Dinosaur and the Eyewitness Book Dinosaur.
b. Discuss the reasons that other species have become threatened, endangered or extinct. Talk about things that kids can do to preserve the earth's ecology.
12. Use Mathosaurus software program from Micrograms for counting games with dinosaur graphics.
Resources:
Non-fiction
Aliki. Digging Up Dinosaurs. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1981.
Aliki. Dinosaur Bones. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1988.
Gibbons, Gail. Dinosaurs. Holiday House, 1987.
Irvine, Joan. How to Make Super Pop-ups. Beech Tree Books, 1992.
Keller, Charles. Colossal Fossils. Prentice-Hall Books for Young Readers, 1987.
Lasky, Kathryn. Dinosaur Dig. Morrow Junior Books, 1990.
Mathosaurus Software. Micrograms Publishing, 1989.
Morin, Paulette. Millennium Technologies, Inc., P.O. Box 67, Stoughton, MA 02072 (617 - 344 - 7449).
Norman, David and Angela Milner. Dinosaur. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
Pickering, Robert. I Can Be An Archaeologist. Children's Press, 1987.
Richardson, John, "Public to Get Rare Glimpse of Dig," Portland Press Herald, July 18, 1994, 1-2B.
Stidworthy, John. More Science Projects: Fossils. Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1989.
Fiction / Poetry
Adler, David. The Dinosaur Princess and Other Prehistoric Riddles. Holiday House, 1988.
"Apple Presents the IIc: Getting Down to BASIC." Apple Computer, Inc., 1984.
Blumenthal, Nancy. Count-a-Saurus. Four Winds Press, 1989.
Fleischman, Paul. Time Train. HarperCollins, 1991.
Goyallon, Jerome. Drawing Dinosaurs. Sterling Publishing Co. Inc., 1993.
Hennessey, B. G. The Dinosaur Who Lived in My Backyard. Viking Kestrel, 1988.
Lyon, George Ella. Who Came Down That Road? Paintings by Peter Catalanotto. Orchard, 1992.
Mayhew, James. Katie and the Dinosaurs. Bantam Books, 1992.
Most, Bernard. Four and Twenty Dinosaurs. Harper & Row, 1990.
Most, Bernard. If the Dinosaurs Came Back. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Most, Bernard. Where to Look for a Dinosaur. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993.
Prelutsky, Jack. Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast. Greenwillow Books, 1988.
Pulver, Robin. Mrs. Toggle and the Dinosaur. Four Winds Press, 1991.
Talbott, Hudson. Your Pet Dinosaur. Morrow Junior Books, 1992.
Watterson, Bill. "Calvin and Hobbes," Journal Tribune, July 11 - 16, 1994, p.14.
Whitehead, Pat. Dinosaur Alphabet Book. Troll Associates, 1985.
Prepared by Margaret McNamee, Cleaves Law Library.
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