Tzemach Class 2016: We Love Dinosaurs!

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Tzemach class! Our dinosaur exploration is in full swing and we're having a blast! We've been asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of research. We've made some pretty cool discoveries, such as learning about the world's largest known dinosaur. We've also been talking a lot about Chanukah. We'll be continuing our study of this holiday into next week as well. You may notice that we've changed out our "Jewish Studies" table. It now contains a menorah, dreidels, and a large collections of Chanukah books for the kids to read and learn more about the holiday.

All the talk of imprints last week, led us to talking about dinosaur footprints and the possible fossils these prints would make. This conversation evolved into us 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 were amazed to learn that these dinosaurs dwarfed all the others...including the big T-Rex...because in the mind of a 4 year old, the T-Rex is the biggest of them all :) 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 over 4 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 9 kids could fit in that one dinosaur footprint!

One question asked at the beginning of our study was, what do dinosaurs eat? We found information about this from our books (thank you to everyone who brought in dino books for us to read!). We divided dinosaurs into 2 categories: carnivores and herbivores. We spent some time going through our books and talking about each dinosaur specifically. We focused mainly on what they ate, where the probably lived, and their size. We also pulled out some magazines and cut out different pictures of meats and plants. After cutting, we divided them into categories and then glued them to posters of the different types of dinosaurs. We learned that even though the T-Rex was the biggest meat eater, the herbivore dinosaurs were actually the biggest in size! We also learned that many of these dinosaurs were extremely smart and used a lot of skill when hunting for food. We learned that most of the plant eaters had to be larger in size so that they could eat leaves from the tops of trees. The kids even turned some lunches into discussions of whether they were having a carnivore or herbivore lunch day!

Throughout the week, we've been discussing the word "archeologist". To become archeologist ourselves, we did some research on bones and skeletons. We read some boks about how archeologist uncover these bones and how they piece them together. During center time, we made an archeologist station available for the kids. We laid out some recycled pieces from our creation station and even some items from nature. We encouraged the kids to use these pieces to form their own dinosaur skeletons. We let the kids make the dinosaur skeletons however they chose to make it. We did lay out some books for them to thumb through as they chose which dinosaur they wanted to represent. I love how these turned out! This led to discussions about how many bones a dinosaur actually had. After some research we discovered that the T-Rex had around 200 bones! You can find these skeleton creations in the hallway on our bulletin board.

We're excited to see where our exploration takes us next week!

Love,
Ms. Rachael

Approaches to Learning:

Reason about events, relationships, and events.
Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional:

Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
Participate in group life of class.
Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
Develop friendship with one or two preferred children.
Express fears and concerns to familiar adult.

Language & Literacy:

.Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
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.
Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems.
Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
Contribute to small group or whole class dictation activities.

Mathematics:

Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
Identify the positions firth through tenth using concrete objects.
Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
Investigate solutions to simple problems.

Look how much we can fit into one dinosaur footprint!...