More Dinos!

We had an exciting week in the Aalva class! Our exploration on dinosaurs is in full swing and the kids are LOVING learning about these fascinating creatures.

We started off the week off by learning more about the T-Rex. After learning about fossils and imprints everyone had questions about how scientists found footprints of dinosaurs. We learned that archeologists are the scientists that discover ancient artifacts such as dinosaur bones, fossils, and imprints. This week we were all archeologists! Using our math skills we made a replica T-Rex footprint. First we made some predictions about how big we thought the footprint might be, then we dove into the books and from our readings we found out that a tyrannosaurus’s footprint was three feet long.  Using our measuring tape we went to work! First we located on our measuring tape where the three foot mark was, next we placed the tape on piece of paper, and afterwards with the help of Ms. Rachael we drew our footprint. We then did some predicting of how many shoes we thought could fit into that one dinosaur footprint. We came to the conclusion that 25 shoes could fit in that one dinosaur footprint!

As archeologists this week we also did research on dinosaur bones and skeletons. We read a few books about how archeologists uncover these bones and how they piece them together. During center time this week we added some “dinosaur bones” in the science center and watched as the children played with the “bones” and created dinosaurs. Using toilet paper rolls they worked as a team to create their dinosaur and show it to their peers. They really seemed to enjoy this and had many questions about dinosaur bones, so as an extension we decided to extend our talk about dinosaur skeletons.  One question that someone had was, “How many bones do dinosaurs have?” Since none of our books had any information on this we decided to look to the computer. Everyone watched as we located articles and read about dinosaur bones. We discovered that a Tyrannosaurus Rex had 200 bones!

After I thought we had wrapped up our talk on skeletons I found out that some of the kids wanted to make their own skeletons. So going back to our exploration on our specific dinosaurs, we decided to let each student make a skeleton of the dinosaur they had chosen for their imprints last week. Everyone had a lot of fun learning about the bones of their dinosaur and creating their very own skeletal masterpiece! Next week we plan to focus on the extinction of dinosaurs and all the possible theories behind their extinction. We cannot wait to see where this takes us and see what the kids want to do to learn more about these theories!

 Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

 

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.

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.

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

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.