The Honey Bees spent the week wrapping up Space and starting to contemplate dinosaurs. All of our community paintings of the planets went up around the room. This week we’ll cut each one into twelve smaller planets for a take home project. We used some of our knowledge about individual planets to draw and color with oil pastels on black paper. We learned about the largest volcano in the solar system, and are already interested in volcanos on Earth. On Tuesday our large media bin was filled with rocks, a volcano, and an assortment of dinosaurs.
We continued reading books that appeal to our love of cheese with “Scuttle’s Big Wish,” and then “Sidney, Stella, and the Moon. Ask your Honeybee what might happen if the moon accidentally gets knocked out of the sky with a bouncy ball.
We played with dinosaurs in water bins with measuring tools and pipettes and used our dinosaurs as a canvas for thick paint later in the week. We learned about dinosaur scientists, paleontologists, and got to hold a real fossilized dinosaur bone. We are learning about Carnivores and Herbivores, and we’ll make some large cardboard models for our room so that we can create a dinosaur world. We’ll set up a fossil dig and make our own fossils.
Melissa Henry, the youth outreach coordinator for the New River Land Trust, joined me in the classroom on Friday. She and I joined forces last summer for an amazing outdoor camp, Wild in the Park, at Heritage Park. It’s going to happen again for ages 6-12 this year. We are also partnering with Loco Arts at the old Newport High School for mornings of nature adventures and art afternoons. Mel was so fun to have in our room. We enjoyed getting to know her, and we told her all about our lives. She told us about her pig named Winnie and her ducks. I’m excited that she will be joining us as a substitute teacher this winter.
