Our Month Long Dinosaur Study: Week 1, "The Dig!"

Being stuck inside can become dull quickly with a group of energetic preschoolers, but this month we decided to study all things "Dinosaur" with our educational partners at Mother Goose Time.  

Our little learners discovered what a Paleontologist is and does as they dug into fun with this science and math filled week. 

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Language and Literacy

Our Field Journals provide Language Arts for our Emerging Readers, writing and pre-writing practice with shapes, letters, and numbers; plus plenty of space for recording our own observations!

We began our week discovering what the word "Paleontologist" means - a person (scientist) that studies the history of life.  In this history we are studying dinosaur bones.  We then discussed what an "Excavation Site" was as we made our very own dirt dough to excavate and imprint fossils in to take home and share with our families.

Science and Sensory

Our dirt dough was made with coffee grounds, flour, salt, and water all measured and mixed to create a soil like consistency.  This provided full sensory immersion into our fossil review as our Paleontologists pressed dino feet, heads, and bodies into mounds of "mud" then placed them into the oven to harden, simulating the solid fossils like those found in real digs.

Q-tips and our favorite homemade dough make easy to create fossils. 

Our teachers joined in the fun creating Pterodactyls, Brontosaurus, and T-Rex (always the crowd favorite!)

Units of Measure

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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).

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These child-sized rubber dinosaur math manipulatives and counting cards are set up on one of our math shelves and allow our students to independently add and subtract their way to 10.  We also use these as game pieces in our new math game, Dinosaur Dig!  

Dinosaur Dig provided excellent opportunity for math skill enhancement through self directed game play.  We loved this easy to follow game and I wrote a bit more about it here...

https://www.woolseyacademy.com/blog/math-magic

Creative Arts

Many of our S.T.E.A.M. activities are intertwined and provide for learning through play on 
multiple planes of achievement and skill levels that fit our mixed age group. This is just one of many that we accomplished this week. We stamped with browns, and whites as we mixed and swirled our stampers to look like dinosaur feet in the dirt.  We discussed how a dinosaur made imprints in the soil with their feet that could last for a very long time as they hardened in the sun.

Week 1 of this month's Dinosaur Dig provided a strong foundation for our budding Paleontologists to discover with friends while building connections with creatures from long ago to their own backyard.  

As always, we wish you well and we hope you get to play today! -L