Dinosaurs!

 

This week was Dinosaurs Week

ROAR!!!!

 

These were our silly dinosaurs.  We made our polka dot dinosaurs and the kids had to tell us one thing they knew about dinosaurs. I have to stay, my kiddos are pretty smart.  They knew that dinosaurs lived a long time ago, there were dinosaurs with spikes, long necks, long tails and they ate plants and/or meat.

 

 

 

My favorite project was our marble painting volcanoes! 

We added glitter to our volcanoes and they turned out so cute.

 



 

We started our FLAT STANLEY display.  So far our Flat Stanleys have returned from PA, New Jersey, Arizona and an airplane ride from Florida to California.  I can't wait when more come back and we can make a big display!

 



 

One of our math projects this week was to add spikes to our Stegosaurus and then count the spikes and write the number.  We are working hard on writing our numbers, which we are also practicing on our circle calendar in the picture you will see below this one!

 

 

 

 We read a silly story called Dinosaurs Love Underpants and it explains why the dinosaurs are extinct and it's because they loved underpants!  The kids LOVED it! and giggled every time Miss Cindy said underpants. 

 

We will finish our project next week but the kids got to watercolor a girl or boy in their underpants!  So silly :)

 

 

 

This dino sensory tub was a big hit!...I put in sand, blue pebbles for the water,

rocks and big and little dinosaurs.

 

 

We learned the dinosaurs hatch from eggs! So we put some easter eggs and little dinosaurs in our blue sensory tub...it was a great fine motor activity for the kids!

 

 

We explored and examined dinosaur bones (from a dinosaur puzzle)

in our wood shavings sensory tub.

 



 

ROAR!!!!

 



 

We even explored in dark brown sugar which hardened over the week and became like little rocks which was really neat.  We added big and little dinosaurs and our wooden tree blocks for stumps.

 



 

We even painted with our little dinosaurs to make dinosaur tracks.

 

 

We painted our eggs and then we cut them open and added a little dino inside! 

 It's such a cute hatching dinosaur baby.

 

 

It was hard to get a photo of our dinosaur cave, but this was one of our favorite activities.  Our dress up center was transformed!  We had dinosaur hats, wooden blocks and big dinosaurs to play with.

 

 

We use our number charts to count out our dinosaurs from 1-9.

 

 

We even cut and sorted the life cycle of a dinosaur as one of our science cetners.

 

 

I even drew a dinosaur skeleton and the kids painted over it with watercolors and the skeleton appeared!

 

 

We had such a great week learned all about dinosaurs! 

 

Next week is St. Patrick's Week :)

 

Danielle



Dr Seuss Week

 

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!



We had such a great week reading stories like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears A Who, Fox in Socks and other funny, mixed up stories!

 

My favorite activity by far this week was our photo journals.  We talked about our silly fish and what we thought they would do if they visited our class!  Our students had to pose their fish in any place or activity in the room!  A lot of our students thought it was funny to make their fish eat goldfish!!...

 

 

Our crazy, mixed up sensory tub with paper fish cut outs, easter grass and colorful pom poms!

 

 

The Lorax Sensory Tub...complete with pink rice, truffula tree (straws and pom poms) and some tinsel and scoops for fun!

 

 

In science we observed the fish tank in the school age classroom. 

We drew fish in our journals and described them.

 

 

One of our new magnetic centers! 

 

 

On Fox in Socks day we wore crazy socks and matched up shoes that I had from Travis when he was a baby.  They thought the little shoes were neat and it reinforced matching and pairs!

 

 

We are working hard on our numbers, so this Cat in the Hat center was great for number matching.  They had to count the dots and put one pom pom on each numbered circle!

 

 

Our Cat in the Hat craft...we painted stripes on our cats, added our bow ties and added whiskers to our faces.  So silly and so cute :)

 

 

We read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and used blue water color to paint our fish tanks. 

 

 

 

These were our cats from the Cat in the Hat!

We made our cats, glued on whiskers, drew their faces and finger painted stripes on their hats. 

 

 

 

 This started out as a cloud sensory tub to represent the rainy day from Cat in the Hat but we added some of our crazy fish for some extra fun and the kids LOVED it!

 

 

WE EVEN MADE GREEN EGGS AND HAM!  The kids cracked, whisked and dyed the eggs green!  It was a fantastic science project that ended up as a math project as we then ate and graphed wether we liked/didn't like the eggs!  The kiddos were definitely a little put off by the look of the eggs but they realized that they tasted great! :) Yummy...

 

 

Another shoe photo...

 

We PAINTED with our shoes!!!

 

 

...they turned out so neat!

 

 

We even EXPLODED Ivory Soap in the microwave!  If you put Ivory Soap in the microwave, it expands.  We watched it in the microwave and then put it in the sensory tub and the kids cut it apart.  It was so neat to watch but is a little overwhelming with the smell and it dissolves (it was one of those I will never do again projects) but the kids did LOVE IT!

 

 

We finished up our week by having a Dr. Seuss' Read Across America Day!  We made Dr. Seuss Soup that I found from this site...Lory's Page and I linked it to my Pinterest page.

 

We combined with the preschool classroom and split up into three stories to read If I Ran the Zoo,

Yertle the Turtle and Horton Hears A Who! and do some fun activities!!!!!!

 

Check back for updates to Dinosaur Week!

 

Danielle

 

 

US History Week

This week was US History and Landmarks!

 

We celebrate President's Day!!  We learned about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and President Obama!  We sorted and cleaned pennies in the water table!  We sorted and counted money in our science center (which was so exciting).  We even did penny rubbings.  We drew our own depictions of the American Flag and finger painted the Flag (which you will see a photo of later).

 

We ordered pennies on a number line from 1-22 and even practiced counting in Spanish!

 

One of my favorite activities...

 

I took a photo of their profile and cut it out on black paper.  They cut out the circle, glued on their photo and wrote their name!  So cute!

 

 

 

Here you can see a side by side comparison....

 



 

Here was us cleaning pennies in the sensory tub.  Miss Danielle added so much soap, you couldn't even see the pennies!  We used this tub for 4 days and it never got old!  Kids LOVE bubbles!

 

 

This was one of our left over Valentine projects!  We used water colors to paint in our salad spinners.  This was such a neat activity because we would add one color, spin it and look at it.  Then we would add another color and so on until all 5 colors were added.  The kids LOVED looking at it in between each color.

 

 

  Another salad spinner project

We even finger painted!

 

 These were our Abraham Lincolns.  Can you see the beards?  They also had to tell us what they would hide under their top hats...a lot of students would hide a bunny!

 

 

 

Introducing Flat Stanley!  If you have never read the book Flat Stanley please do so!  Anyway...Stanley gets flattened by a bulletin board and his family mails him to California to visit his friend.  He also helps catch a bank robber and flies like a kite.  We colored our own Flat Stanleys and hopefully some of our families will mail him to their families too!  We'd like to create a map of all the places our Flat Stanley's have visited!  Miss Vanessa is taking hers to Disney and Miss Danielle also mailed hers to a family member in Florida and a friend in Australia!!!

 

 

 

 

On Cherry Pie Day (yes we ate Cherry Pie...yum!), we used our red "cherry" pom poms to spell out the letter Mm.

 

 

We also cut M's out of map and glued it on our paper!  It was a very good fine motor skill to cut straight and diagonal lines.

 

 

I wish I would have taken in progress photos of this project but it was very involved!  We blew through straws to spread out our brown watercolor paint and tried to make trees.  Some of our friends needed some help but they turned out cute!...

 

 

After they dried we used q-tips to paint cherries on them!