Dinosaurs...ROAR!

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Tzemach class! We've really enjoyed hearing about everyone's Thanksgiving break. It's been a great week for us to readjust and get back into the swing of things. We had a lot going on this week, including saying good bye to our Math Buddies. As you all know, the kids absolutely love Math Buddy time and we are so thankful to have had a fun semester with Rabbi Meir's students! As a fun good bye activity, the kids made play dough with their buddy using flour, salt, corn starch, oil, and paint. They had a blast! I'm sure they were very excited to show off the play dough. We also got to visit with a 1 year old goat this week. The kids enjoyed petting it and asking questions about the goat. It was a last minute activity that we didn't plan on, but definitely enjoyed!

We also started a new exploration this week...DINOSAURS! Of course the kids have been giddy about this new exploration and it was an easy transition from dirt as we talked about fossils during our dirt explorations. We started this exploration off as we always do, with a KWL chart. The kids knew a lot about dinosaurs but they also came up with some pretty awesome 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 question we had was about fossils. Using books, 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 into stone. We decided to make our own imprints. We have a box full of realistic miniature size dinosaur skeletons. There was 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). This was a great way for us to start our exploration and learn the names of some different dinosaurs. It gave the kids a lot to talk about and many more questions to ask!

After our fossil imprints were dry, we decided to do some research on our dinosaurs. We sat down one on one with the kids and talked about their fossil. After figuring out the name of our fossil's dinosaur, we looked through 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 a few interesting facts about their dinosaur. After we felt that we finished 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. This will allow you can see both the dinosaur and it's skeletal imprint!

Our research on dinosaurs took a lot more time that I thought it would. The kids spent several days enjoying the books and working with their fossils. This cut out some other activities we were planning but we'd much rather take our time when they're enjoying it so much! We're excited to see where this dinosaur exploration takes us next!

Love,
Ms. Rachael



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:

• Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical idea.

Enjoying time making play dough with our Math Buddies...

 

 

Working on our fossils imprints...

 

 

Reading and researching dinosaurs!...

 

 

We got to pet a goat and learn some facts about him...