Were dinosaurs warm blooded, cold blooded, reptile, mammal?

The children have been interacting with different sources of information over the past week or so and have been bringing up some concepts and understandings that they have heard or read about but don’t necessarily fully grasp. These discussions have shown children making connections with their prior understandings and the new information they have encountered, it is also interesting to listen to how they agree with and  build on to each others ideas or disagree with statements and introduce new theories. This discussion arose before school started seemingly from nowhere. But introduced some huge concepts that we will now explore further.

Jewels: A T-Rex was just a giant lizard which is a mammal. (What is a mammal?) We’re mammals, it’s a thing with meat in it. It’s warm blooded and lizards are cold blooded  they are probably outside all the time and we are inside.

Sean: The mammals are type of animals.

Alicya: but we’re not animals.

Sean: Reptiles are types of animals too.

Noah: Dinosaurs are mammals but they are bigger than  people and they have horns but if dinosaurs were people we would have horns but they can’t be people because they died before us.

At this stage the discussion ceased because bell went and had to attend assembly. On our return, I read a library book brought along by one of the children about dinosaur babies. I the opening pages it stated that Dinosaurs were reptiles.

Jewels: dinosaurs aren’t reptiles because they are mammals, because they have warm meat.

Crystal: and warm blood. 

Bradley: They spend most of their time outside so they must be cold blooded.

Ashton: I disagree, they spend most of their time outside so the must be hot blooded.

Jewels: because of the sun they must be hot.

Harriet: Dinosaurs have to go outside so they can eat meat.

Alicya: If there was a volcano that exploded it must have been very hot so they must have been hot blooded.

Noah: some dinosaurs are hot and some are cold and some are both.

Sean: T-Rex is hot blooded but it eats cold blooded and hot blooded dinosaurs so it has both inside it.

Emelia: Some animals have hot and cold blood.

Lucia: I am warm blooded

Jewels: I’m both because it gets cold sometimes.

Shawn: If you went to the south pole.

Lucia: It is freezing.

Jewels: You would be definitely be cold blooded.

Alicya: How do we know what colour dinosaur blood is?

Noah: Red

Jewels: Some blood is white.

 

At this stage the children’s understanding of warm blooded and cold blooded is that it is determined by the temperature of the environment in which they live and  the blood type of the animals they are eating.