Tuesday began our week of DINOSAURS. Seriously, though, folks have you ever met a kid who isn't at least mildly obsessed with dinosaurs? Me either. They love them. And really, so do we. This is evidenced by the many (MANY) movies marketed to adults with dinosaur themes. We did not watch any movies, kid appropriate or not, this week in preschool, however. We did learn what a paleontologist is and how they work with other scientists to discover and preserve fossils. Oh, yeah, we learned what fossils were, too. We even tried to dig up a few of our own in a wading pool filled with 50 pounds of dry pinto beans (I will do a lot for my students but allow them to chisel through limestone in my school room is not one of them). We did find a few dinosaurs but what we mostly found were SIGHT WORDS! If we could read them we could put them on the magnet board, but if not, we buried them again and tried to remember them for the next time they were dug up. Later in the week we did some digging for answers to some mystery math problems. Who knows what is hiding in those beans. . .uh. . .I mean layers of sedimentary rock.
As Tuesday is the day we typically focus on art we learned how to draw a stegosaurus step by step. We are still studying line and have started noticing how lines form shapes and that all pictures are made of shapes and lines. Each step of our drawing used a shape, some of those shapes we knew the names of like diamond, or half-circle, but some we did not. We made up names for some (squiggly triangle) and just copied down the others. We knew that stegosaurus ate plants because we had read about that in a book before we started our drawing, so we drew grass, trees and plants all around our dinosaur. Scientists don't know what color stegosaurus or any dinosaur was. Skin and scales are not preserved in the fossil layer. We tried to guess what color our dinos would be. . .of course the kids had to tell me in Spanish, as we have learned the colors in Spanish and now we need to practice them whenever we can.
We still had to practice our sight words, even during Dino Week. We used them to practice our handwriting this time and got a sticker next to each one we could read by ourselves. Most of the kids passed off their home reading books on Tuesday. I was so proud of them! They were happy to put a sticker on their book chart. Remember parents: four stickers earns them a book to keep out of my special 'book box'.
More on dino week to come. . .blogging is hard! Seriously, though, try typing with my 1 year-old in the room, I dare you.
No comments:
Post a Comment