Dinosaurs

This week we had the opportunity to explore a new unit, with the children’s interests specifically in mind. In order to assure what topic they wanted to learn more about we took a class vote last week and the winner was Dinosaurs! So, that is what we learned all about.  

We mainly focused on five different types of dinosaurs: triceratops, brachiosaurus, apatosaurus, stegosaurus, and tyrannosaurus rex. We learned so many different facts about each dinosaur. We learned some dinosaurs were plant eaters, some were meat eaters and how they were able to protect themselves from their predators, plus so much more! 

For a fun math activity we printed out a giant triceratops footprint from Here. How many of our feet can fit into one footprint? We placed our shoes in the footprint, 10 pairs of shoes were able to fit inside the footprint. So big! How many unifix cubes long? We counted out that it was 36 unifix cubes. We had so much fun measuring and counting. 

We also learned that there are special scientists that study dinosaur fossils and bones. They are called paleontologists. We pretended to be paleontologists in our very own classroom, in the sand table. Would we be able to find any dinosaur bones or fossils? Earlier in the week we made our own unique dinosaur bones with salt dough. We added them to our sand table. We were very careful, using paint brushes to dust off the sand, to conduct our own dino dig.

Additionally, when learning about fossils we made our own fossil sugar cookies. We used a toy dinosaur to create the footprint. They looked just like real fossils, except these one tasted yummy!  

As an art project we created dinosaur footprint pictures.

Also, at the end of the week we illustrated our favorite dinosaur that we learned about and then labeled the picture. Each child then dictated one fact that they learned about the dinosaur.

Moreover, our neighbors 3E invited us over. One of their student’s grandparents is a cartoonist and he showed us what he can draw and how he draws it. Believe it or not he even illustrated for us a dinosaur scene!

Tu B’Shvat

This week we focused our attention on Tu B’Shvat, the birthday of the trees! We showed the children a globe and where New York was on the globe. We then explained to the children even though it is winter in New York and the trees do not have any leaves, on the other side of the world the sun is starting to warm up and it is becoming spring.

In honor of Tu B’shvat we decided to conduct a fun science experiment. We decided to see if we would be able to grow our own plants. However, in our science experiment we are not going to grow our seeds in soil; we are going to just use lima beans, water, a paper towel and the sun. For this science experiment we will need a lot of patience. As pairs the children sprayed water onto a paper towel and then placed their beans onto the damp paper towels. The children then placed their damp paper towels in a ziplock bag and hung the bags near the window to soak up some of the warm sun. For the next few weeks we will record what we observe.   

To celebrate the birthday of the trees we ate some dried fruits, such as, raisins, apricots, figs and dates. Since most of us have never tasted most of these fruits before we decided to graph which dried fruit we liked the most. After tasting each fruit the children placed a tally mark on our graph, under their favorite dried fruit. The children were able to recognize the name of the fruits just by looking at the beginning letter and sounding it out. We are so proud of our little readers!

As a fun math activity we played a matching game with leaves and numbers. Each child got a leaf with a number written on it and had to match it to the number on the braches. Since we have twelve children in the class we counted to the number twelve. This activity helped teach the children number recognition and one to one correspondence.

We additionally made our very own fruit salad. 

Painting Class

This week we learned about Keith Haring and how he began his art career right here in NYC. We then made our own artwork creating Keith Haring's famous outlines.