We have had such a busy yet fun week. We've had a lot of really cool things happening at our school. We did our second day of recording for the training video and we were also the site for a tour done by educators from all over the state. It was a privilege to be able to participate in both of these events. The kids were happy to show off their room and favorite activities. We also celebrated Tu B'Shevat (The New Year of the Trees) with Morah Devorah! We spent time learning about these trees and sampling different foods that grow on them.
We started our week by continuing our exploration of Africa and lions. We did some research through our Zimbabwe newspapers that we started on last week. We have left these newspapers in the Art center for the kids to use throughout the year. As with all of our explorations, we want it to continue throughout the year. We love to go back and make references to things we've learned in the past. We also finished up our nonfiction books. We had some students focus solely on lions, some on Africa, and some chose to do a combination of both. As we worked we talked about the process of writing. The kids used both writing and illustrations to write their stories. They finalized them with both a front and back cover. I hope you are amazed, just as we are, as you watch their development in writing. Each one of them has come such a long way since August! You can find all of these books in the hallway. Make sure you read a few since we all wrote about different facts.
Since we felt like we exhausted their interest of lions and Africa, we have moved on to a new exploration...dinosaurs! 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 hard. 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). Each fossil is labeled with the dinosaur name on the back.
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 fossils, 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. These are still a work in progress but when we finish we will put them in the hallway with their fossil imprints. This will allow you can see both the dinosaur and it's skeletal imprint!
We can't wait to learn more about dinosaurs in the weeks to come! I hope everyone has a fun and safe weekend!
Love,
Mrs. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Researching Africa through newspapers...
Making dinosaur imprints...
Researching our dinosaurs and drawing them...
Celebrating Tu B'Shevat with Morah Devorah...
We love our pattern blocks!
We are musicians...
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