Even our bitty ones get to build those little pincer grasps, create with colors, mix paints, and experience Creative Arts through play. We simply put them in their highchairs and let them determine how long and how much they want to participate. This is vital to proper development and our mixed-age approach to learning provides LOTS of sensory awareness and practice through play. Our curriculum partners at Mother Goose Time understand and promote this approach to learning and provide materials for every child in our group ages 9 mos-5 years! "Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else." - Sydney Gurewitz Clemens Mix in some Science!We couldn't resist the opportunity to create some baking soda volcanoes with our home made dough, vinegar, and baking soda! This is the recipe we use for our ever popular homemade dough. We add glitter, sparkles, confetti, food coloring, etc. depending on our current monthly themes. It is by far the very BEST recipe we have EVER used!! Materials
And a dash of Emergent Reading...This week we studied the letters "V" and "E: for volcano and we practiced using it in our word puzzles. We found the letter sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of the words. This helped us understand the how the letters sound and what it means for a word to "start with" a certain letter. Dino Tic-Tac-Toe!! We added a new game to take home!Our Dino Make and Take game began as a fine motor skill building activity that was quickly embraced as our little learners excitedly understood that they would be taking THIS game home to share with moms and dads! We carefully cut along the dotted lines and asked the teachers and our friends for help when we felt we needed it. We worked diligently to create our rectangular pieces. Some needed a bit of tape, but that just makes the process even more fun!! Why do we send these seemingly simple games home?In closing this week, I leave you with this...And that wraps up our month of playing with the dinosaurs at Woolsey Academy.
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Week Three With The Dinosaurs: Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes! (and maybe a claw or two!)1/23/2018 Seriously? Do they make them ANY cuter?? I get to spend my days filled with the most DARLING Wild Things!! Our dinosaur hats set the pace for this fun filled and educational week. This week our dinosaur studies focused on Dinosaur Bodies and we learned about their heads, bones, habitats, and foods. We learned that some dinosaurs had heads as big as a car and some were very small. As we further discussed the types of foods they ate, we discovered that their heads and teeth were larger for the the meat eaters and seemed smaller for the veggie eaters. We hypothesized that maybe it is because it is harder to chew up a burger than a lettuce leaf so maybe they needed those big teeth to help them survive! Check out our Wild Things!!These haute hats were courtesy of our education partners at Mother Goose Time and went along with our weekly lesson about dinosaur bodies. We discussed the things that all dinosaurs had in common which were eyes and teeth. Some dinosaurs had noses on their heads and some had big teeth while others were quite small, but they all had them. As we cut and pasted and placed our dino's facial features where we thought they should go we were learning about the proper geometric placement of facial features which is a developmental milestone in young learners. (Chalk up another win for the team for making learning into play!! Way to go team Woolsey Academy!!!) Puzzles, puzzles everywhere!!Our education partners at Mother Goose Time sent us some simplistic puzzles that went along with our newest book, "Jurassic Jam". Our students excitedly recognized the characters and went to work building each three piece puzzle back into it's proper single unit form. Keeping fresh materials (like new puzzles) available for our little learners is vital to development as it "Allows children to learn that a whole is made of parts. Develops hand-eye co-ordination and fine motor skills. Builds visual-perceptual skills. Develops attention, concentration and thinking skills such as recognizing, remembering, matching, sorting and problem sorting." - https://www.lifeslittletreasures.org.au/prematurity/support-for-families/prematurity-articles/how-puzzles-can-help-your-child-develop/ |
Jurassic Jam provided by our educational partners at Mother Goose Time, provides a great rhythm and meter as each page describes a grand gathering of dinosaur friends cheerfully entertaining on their instruments. Our students quickly caught onto the patterns presented and began finishing the sequence by stories end.. |
| It is important to provide little learners with tools that allow them to explore complex concepts like "fossils" and these little assorted dinosaur fossils that we ordered from Amazon fit well with helping them to understand what a "fossil" is. Here is the link http://a.co/4mIEsDh. We used these for making imprints and impressions, for painting and stamping and here we used them to measure length, height, and width, comparing our veggie eaters (herbivores) and our meat eaters (carnivores). |
I write a lot about games that teach. I believe in teaching through play. I believe in experiences, music, dancing, squishy dough and finger paints, dress-up and dolls, trains and trucks that haul loads and whose tracks meander around our classrooms. Our dinosaur studies with Mother Goose Time this month have been full of opportunities for all the "fun"dementals of play and I have been like a kid in a candy store enjoying all the newness each day brings. There are, however, certain games that make me FLIP! These games are always an instant hit with our little learners and provide the freedom for organic learning through engaged involvement. They don't realize the science behind the game. They don't realize that I am providing these experiences because not only do I know they will LOVE it, but they will be building critical thinking skills and not even realize they are learning. I can actually measure their expertise increase as they play. It is magical.... Sigh..... |
"There isn't anything more full of hope, joy and peace than a child's smile... It captures the mundane and makes it extraordinary." - LaDonna Woolsey
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All
A Little Bit Of This And That!
A View You Can Use!
A-Z Alphabet Theme
C Is For Cookie!
Continents And Countries
Curiosity
Curriculum
Dandelions And Darlings...
Happy Halloween!
Help For Tired Mommas...
Holidays
Letter M Monkey
Letter N Newts
Letter O Olympics
Letter P Is For People
Letter Q Is For Queen
Letter S
Letters Learning
Letter T
Letter U
Letter W
Letter X
Play Based Learning
Preschool
R Is For Rainbow
Sensory Play
Teaching And Learning
Turtles And Trains
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