I hope you have had a chance to come by our room because it is looking very prehistoric. On Friday they even requested that we make a flying reptile together. I love that they are finding that we can create our own environments as we learn about new things.
We are wrapping up our dinosaur inquiry on Monday after some of our friends finish their air dry clay fossil project. Monday we’ll also do individual fossil digs and hopefully bring home some sharks teeth and fossilized coral and sea shells. This has been a week of dinosaur songs and books. Marci loaned us We Are The Dinosaurs, the book version of the song by Laurie Berkner, and we read that every day. The children were very interested in the caves in the book and are wondering if the mountain is really a volcano. ( BOLcano!!!!) We’ve also read The Dirty Dinosaur every day with lots of big belly laughs.
We’ve been singing The Stegasaurus Song and The Triceratops song this week. I wonder if there are any volcano songs? Please know that I try very hard to make some of these scary things “just science”. We don’t dwell on meat eating dinosaurs or dangerous lava. The kids like to talk about seeing dinosaurs, but they know that dinosaurs lived a long time before people and that they never have to worry about the dinosaurs… and they will know that we don’t live near volcanos.
On Friday we talked about the cretaceous period and the rise of flowering plants. We made beautiful tissue paper flowers for our class tree and talked about how these flowers may have been very stinky. We know that bees are good pollinators today, but perhaps these giant flowers were pollinated by flies and other insects that were not looking for sweet nectar. We also talked about the giant dragonflies of the cretaceous period.
We will build a paper mache volcano this week, and Candace will come on Friday to do a demonstration of an eruption…. an outdoor eruption. Did you know that there are three different kinds of lava?
We have a new Tuesday/Thursday friend at school. Her name is Lily and your children have been kind and loving and have helped her feel right at home.
I think Lauren and I have decided that our next unit will be on the human body.
