Cardboard boxes with twine strings suspended in a grid on top were on four tables in Renee Miller and Carianna Liefland’s Upper Elementary classroom at Sedona Charter School on March 26.
Students huddled around and reached in with small brushes to clear dirt from wooden replicas of dinosaur bones.
Arantza Esquer sat at her desk, finishing up her drawings once the class was done. The students needed to draw at least 15 bones.
“Figuring out what bone it was and the excitement of finding it was pretty cool,” Esquer said.
Her paper was split into six boxes that correlated with the grid atop the cardboard box.
“It’s a way of keeping track,” Sedona author and former teacher Diane Kristoff said. “They’ll dig one square at a time. What do they find two inches down, three inches down, whatever, and then they move on to the next.”
Kristoff, aka “Dino Diane,” whose published work includes the Dino Diane’s Adventures Series, was at the school as part of the city of Sedona’s Artist in the Classroom program.
“It really tells a lot about how it died, what happened to the bones afterwards,” Kristoff said. “This whole find is based on Jack Horner … excavation of Montana, where he discovered the herd of 10,000 dinosaurs.”
The students had read her book and listened to a presentation of Kristoff’s own experiences at dinosaur excavations, were tasked with finding and drawing their findings, and then reconstructing their dinos the following week.
“I liked the drawing,” student India Flores said. “It was kind of fun.”
“The whole experience is very Montessori,” Miller said. “Because we start with concrete — reading her book, looking at examples of fossils, understanding what not only her education, but her vocation [as a paleontologist] is, and being with her — and then this concrete experience of actually uncovering bones, and it’s slowly moving to the abstract, where they worry about history, about anatomy.”
Kristoff used to teach middle school science in Scottsdale before moving to Sedona.
She said the students had been preparing for state exams, so they’d been sitting down for a while and wanted to get them up and moving.
Before the excavation began, she had the students stand up to play a game of “Dino Diane Says,” where she had them remember and point to different types of bones they each had, like the cranium, humorous and lower mandible. All these scientific names for bones have direct relations with the names for the dinosaur bones they dug up on Thursday.
Nancy Lattanzi, the city’s Arts and Culture Deparment specialist, said Kristoff is new to the program, with her trip to the charter school kicking off her presence as an artist in the classroom.
Contact Lattanzi at NLattanzi@sedonaaz.gov or (928) 203-5078 for additional information on the Artist in the Classroom program.
