Dear Families,
The Honeybees are finished their dinosaur and fossil study. I think we know a lot about the time of the dinosaurs and are pretty confident we aren’t going to run into one today. Did your child show you how to make millions of years go by with hand motions? I used a model dinosaur, sand, and water to illustrate how dinosaur fossils were made. The Honeybees helped model pressure and the passage of time.
We listened to a lot of They Might be Giants last week. Have you heard the Paleontologist Song. Really, any of their kid’s albums make great car music.
We also learned the Stegasaurus song.
Then there’s always the classic Laurie Berkner dinosaur tune.
We learned about the three periods of geologic time that made up the age of the Dinosaurs and talked about how the Earth looked millions of years ago. Your children can identify a lot of dinosaurs and understand that some animals eat meat and some eat plants.They know that they are reptiles who lay eggs.
At the same time we were learning about dinosaurs, we were also learning about the frog life cycle.The Bluebirds welcomed us into their room to see their tadpoles grow. Back in our room we could recreate the life cycle on the light projector. We’ll keep visiting the tadpoles as they develop front legs and lose their tails.When the cycle is complete I’ll take them back to the swamp where they began.
We closed our dinosaur study with two days of real fossil hunting. I have some substrate from a fossil museum in Aurora North Carolina that is rich with bones, teeth, coral, and shells. We found lots of little shark teeth, and Juliana even found a fossilized bat ray mouth plate. The Honeybees were really focused with their “paleontologist eyes” and enjoyed the tools and the process.
It’s fun to move from Dinosaurs to Chickens. On Friday we read our first chicken book and found a similarity between chickens and some dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs swallow stones to help break up their food, much like a chicken swallows grit to help digest their food.
Our fertile hatching eggs shipped yesterday!! I’m guessing they’ll arrive at the post office tomorrow. Next they need to REST for the night before we put them in the incubator. During our 21 day countdown to chicks, we are going to learn about Honeybees, seeds, and baby animals. Did you see the pictures of our special lamb visitors. Mary’s grandparents brought two bottle lambs for us to pet and feed.
I’m just going to whisper that there are four weeks left of the school year. We’ll make the most of it.
Big love,
Sally
