Dinosaurs...ROAR!

Hello family and friends!

We've started a new area of exploration this week...dinosaurs! I wish you could have seen the kids on Monday when they heard the announcement. I've never seen such a response! The jumping and screaming and clapping was a little surprising. I mean, I knew they liked dinosaurs, but I had no idea that they REALLY LOVED DINOSAURS! We started this exploration off as we always do, with a KWL chart. The kids knew a lot about dinosaurs and because of this they had some pretty detailed questions. Some questions were about specific types of dinosaurs but the majority covered the species as a whole. Throughout our study we will end up touching on both the individual types as well as the species in general. I'm excited to see what we discover!

One of the things the kids were really curious about were fossils. Using books from our classroom and the library, we were able to find out a lot of new facts about fossils. We learned that fossils were formed over a very long period of time. Throughout that length of time, the dinosaur bones actually turned into stone, which is what we know as a fossil. We also learned that fossils come in different forms. Some insects have been preserved in hard pieces of sap for thousands of years! We also learned that some fossils are actually called imprints. This is when an animal or plant leaves it's imprint in mud, which is eventually filled with sand, and finally turns hard. Since they thought fossils were so interesting, we decided to make our own. We have a box full of realistic miniature size dinosaur skeletons. There are a wide variety of dinosaurs so we let each child pick which dinosaur interested them the most. We then made our own salt dough and pressed the skeleton into the dough, in order to make a dinosaur imprint. We then cooked the dough until it became hard (like the imprint fossils found today). They turned out looking so neat! Each fossil is labeled with the dinosaur name on the back. Make sure you check them out on display in the hallway.

After our fossil imprints were dry, we decided to do some research on our dinosaurs. Michelle and I sat down one on one with the kids and talked about their fossil. After figuring out the name of our fossils, we dove into tons of books to learn more about them. We let the kids search through the books to find pictures of their specific dinosaur. Once they found a page that interested them, we read through the pages together. Our goal after reading was to have an understanding of at least 3 interesting facts about their dinosaur. After we felt that we exhausted our book exploration with each child, we let them draw a picture of their dinosaur based on what they learned. The kids talked with us through their drawings, giving details about the different body parts of their dinosaur and their uses. They labeled their drawing with the dinosaur name and we asked them to share some facts they learned about their dinosaur. We wrote the facts on their labeled drawings. These are in the hallway with their fossil imprints so you can see both the dinosaur and it's skeletal imprint!

We also spent some time this week studying the world's biggest dinosaurs. Through our exploration we found out that the largest dinosaurs are in a group called "sauropods". These types of dinosaurs are characterized by having long tails and necks, as well as large tree-trunk size legs. We found a drawing in one of our books that showed us the differences in size between all the dinosaurs. It was obvious from the drawing that these types of dinosaurs dwarfed all the others. Of course the kids thought this was amazing! (because how is anything bigger than a T-Rex?! :)). We made some predictions about how big we thought the largest dinosaur footprint would be. After some research we found out that the largest one recorded is 5 feet in diameter. We decided to get some paper and make a huge dinosaur footprint that measured the same size. We then did some predicting of how many kids we thought could fit into that one dinosaur footprint. The kids also took off their shoes and compared the difference in size between their foot and the dinosaur footprint. We came to the conclusion that 6 kids could fit in that one dinosaur footprint!

Besides dinosaurs, we have also added a listening center to our classroom this week. We have a small table set up with a CD player and headphones. Under this table is a large selection of books and CDs to go along with them. We've colored the "play" button green and the "stop" button red. We also showed them the power button and had a little demonstration session on how everything works. Our hope was that they would be able to use the player and CDs independently...so far so good! They've really gotten the hang of it and seem to be enjoying the new center. Feel free to check it out with them the next time you come to the classroom!

Approaches to Learning:

Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
Demonstrate growing initiative in selecting and carrying out activities.

Social & Emotional:

Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.

Language & Literacy:

Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
Combine some letters with pretend writing.
Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
Creates a picture and labels it orally.
Understand relationship between print and pictures on a page.

Mathematics: