Simply the Best of the Wild, Wild West

Howdy friends! Texas Public Schools week just finished up, so I thought I’d share some of the books and activities we’ve enjoyed as we learn about Texas and the Old West!

I was excited to discover a Wild West story time kit at my local public library.  Have you checked to see what kind of resources are available in yours?  This kit included 7 picture books, a felt story for Click Clack Moo, and a horse puppet.   

My kiddos LOVED the felt story and the puppet the best!  Here are some of the highlights, including library books and my own personal collection:

Cowboy Camp, by Tammi Sauer.  In this story the unlikely hero, Avery, doesn’t like eating beans, is allergic to horses, and gets rope burn from holding a lasso.  Fortunately for everyone, Avery is able to outsmart the villain, and saves the day.  I LOVED putting on my best western accent… plus jeans, hat, vest and boots… to read this story!  The children really got into it too.

 

Since cowboys aren’t only boys, I wanted to include I Want To Be A Cowgirl, by Jeanne Willis.  It’s a quick read, perfect for kindergarten and preschool children, and so important for including girls!  

If you’re teaching in Texas you’re sure to teach your students about armadillos.  In the past I’ve read Armadillo Rodeo by Jan Brett, and It’s an Armadillo! By Bianca Lavies. 

 While I’ll probably still read those sometimes, I discovered another fun book to teach facts about armadillos: Don’t Ever Cross That Road!, by Conrad J. Storad.  It’s told by an armadillo teacher to his class of young armadillos, and includes lots of facts about them.  It’s the not crossing the road part that anyone who’s driven much in Texas can relate to. (When they’re scared armadillos jump straight up, which doesn’t end well when they’re scared by an oncoming vehicle.)

 

The Gingerbread Cowboy by Janet Squires is a variation on the Gingerbread Man, with a Southwest feel.  The gingerbread cowboy is made by the rancher’s wife, and is chased by desert and ranch animals: a horned lizard, roadrunner, javelinas, longhorns, and cowboys – before being ultimately tricked by a coyote. This was a fun way to review those animals while anticipating the familiar story in a new setting!

Waynetta and the Cornstalk  by Helen Ketteman is another fairy tale variation your students are sure to love! It’s close enough to Jack and the Beanstalk to compare and contrast with your students, with plenty of Texan tidbits thrown in: chicken-fried steak, a magic lasso, a giant’s wife who declares Waynetta is “purty as a bluebonnet” and a tiny longhorn cow that makes solid gold cowpats.  If that’s not a recipe for student engagement, I don’t know what is!

Of course we also learned about Texas symbols with this reading center:

…and with this Texas Bingo game and posters.  

This Texas State Symbols booklet was lovely on our desks for Open House night, and includes 3 versions, so it was easy to make sure every child had one at an appropriate reading level.

I also found this adorable cowboy poem and felt board, which makes a great introduction to any cowboy activity:

I hope you’ll check out some of these books, and I’d love to hear what new Texan / Wild West books you’ve discovered too!   Let me know in the comments below!

Happy spring y’all!

Erupting With Fun: Preschool Volcano Activities

What is cold when it is dormant, hot when it erupts, and totally cool all the time?

Check out all the awesome volcano pictures Ms. Debbie pulled to show the children - they were fascinated by the glowing lava  - who isn't?!  The kiddos even got to act out being volcanoes, and going from dormant to erupting. Jumping up to erupt was their favorite part!

Debbie had a bottle covered in clay to look like a volcano, which we partially filled with some baking soda ahead of time.  When she poured in vinegar (dyed red), the chemical reaction had "lava" flowing out of the vent hole.  Oh my goodness were the kiddos excited!

We followed up our reading, singing, dancing and demonstration, with science and art activities that also stretched our fine motor skills.  To make our volcano diagram, the kiddos tore construction and tissue paper, glued them, wrote their names, and then cut and pasted labels for some of the important parts of a volcano: magma, vent hole, ash, and lava.

(The label for magma is on the back, because it is only magma while it is underground.  As soon as it emerges from the vent hole it is called lava.)

We had fun sorting out things that are hot (like a volcano) and things that are cold.

The highlight of the whole time was definitely letting the children build their own pebble volcanoes, and mixing baking soda and red vinegar.  They wanted to do it over and over - and with almost 60 children attending this week, we used 3/4 gallon of vinegar, and 4 pounds of baking soda!

The awe on their faces was worth every drop!

Dinosaur activities and books - roaring good fun!

We love dinosaurs!  There's so much to love: they're big (mostly), make awesome noises (especially when voiced by small children), stomp through the prehistoric forests, chase each other, and generally get away with behavior that isn't often encouraged in children.  Who doesn't sometimes want to live vicariously as a dinosaur?!

For story time this week we read 3 lovely dinosaur fiction books: Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs, Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones, and Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp.  I talked about how much I love Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp in my last blog post, and it is, in fact, the reason we focused on dinosaurs this week - I really wanted to read it again!  Then big question was what we could do along with the books.

If you Pinterest (I believe that really should be a verb, because I do it all the time), you know there are a gazillion fantastic and fun activities to go along with any subject.  Here's a link to my dinosaurs board for those of you who also use Pinterest as a verb. 

We sorted dinosaurs by color.  I made some very simple sorting mats by cutting brightly colored copy paper into quarters, and then mounting 4 of the resulting rectangles on white construction paper.  We had a supply of red, blue, green and yellow dinosaurs in one of our resource kits, so a simple sorting activity was born.

 I say simple, because yes, it is simple.  Simple to prepare, and simple for the children to use, but still very satisfying for young learners!

 I brought in a couple of fossils for the children to explore (carefully).  This child was fascinated with the small vug of crystals in my amonite.

There was dough for the children to make imprints in, much like fossils, but without the millions of years of waiting. (Nobody has time for that!)

Of course, what I have in mind as I put the activities together, and the possibilities the children see, are not always the same thing.  Dinosaur skeletons dancing in the dough?  Why not, after Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp?!

Here's another possibility I never considered.  Tyrannosaurus Rex balancing on his tail and doing the splits.  Bet you never thought of that either!

Here's another early math concept we worked on this week: patterning.  I made AB, ABC, AAB and ABB dinosaur patterns, and the children (and parents) read the patterns, then extended them. 

Our final activity was digging for dinosaur in the Jurassic sand.  There were usually 6 - 8 children gathered around this sensory bin, pretending, digging, or just running the sand through their fingers.  Little do they know they're working on their finger muscle strength, preparing their hands for all the jobs they will do!

As the children left, we asked them to put one stamp on today's graph: Which book did you like best today?

They loved Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones best of all.  After all, who doesn't like dinosaurs?!

Butterfly Learning at Story Time

Have you ever raised caterpillars into butterflies, and watched the magical transformation up close? I've done it many times with classes of children, and we're doing it again at the library.

A week ago we received a special package, 5 tiny little caterpillars in a jar of food, and a net home for them to grow into.  We observed the tiny creatures, and talked about what they would soon do.  (You can see that post here.)

When we returned to story time this week, we no longer had caterpillars - we had 5 magnificent cocoons!  Ms. Debbie carefully showed them to the children, then transferred them into the net home they'll soon inhabit.

We read several butterfly books, both fiction and non-fiction, and learned some great new vocabulary: proboscis, metamorphosis, life cycle, symmetry, chrysalis and more.

To follow up we painted egg carton caterpillars, and gave them pipe cleaner antennae.

We made life butterfly life cycles from pasta (risotto for eggs, rotini for caterpillars, shells for the chrysalis, and of course bow-tie noodles for the butterflies!

We practiced the concept of symmetry by decorating some lovely die-cut butterflies.

We even made a pictograph: Do you prefer caterpillars or butterflies?  Can you guess which one was the most popular?

For all the learning and fun that we had, the best is yet to come.  We're waiting for our butterflies to hatch, and then we'll take them outside, where they belong, and set them free.  If we are very lucky the life cycle will start again in the garden around our library, and we'll have butterflies all summer!

Celebrating Earth Day with Natural Materials - part 2

I wrote last week about some ways to celebrate Earth Day with natural materials - and this week we implemented those ideas at our library story time.  Here are the results!

We (50 children and their caregivers!) took a walk around the library, collecting natural treasures as we went.  In our plants themed learning earlier this month we learned that plants breathe through their leaves, so we didn't want to pick any living leaves or flowers off our plants.  The children were incredibly respectful, choosing fallen leaves, petals, sticks, seed pods, bark and more, but leaving all the living and growing things outside where they belong.

 It was an absolutely beautiful day for a nature walk! 

Back inside, we provided blank pages for the children to arrange their treasures, but instead of giving them glue or another way to stick everything together permanently, we made our creations temporary works - and encouraged our families to teach their children how to use camera phones to capture their pictures!

There was a lot of counting and lining up of materials, as well as some beautiful arrangements!

Here a grandmother is teaching her little one how to use the camera phone, and to email it to mom and dad at work!  This is age appropriate use of technology, a way to use it to connect children and families.  I LOVE IT!

Our caterpillars arrived this week, and we'll be watching them grow and metamorphose - we had out caterpillar books and magnifying glasses today.

We also put out a lovely natural sensory bin for our little ones to explore.  I recently trimmed my rosemary bushes, and saved the fragrant leaves to use as a base for our bin.  We added pretty pebbles, pine cones and shells.  As the children searched through the bin, the rosemary leaves separated from their stems and released a beautiful scent.  This was a sensory bin in more ways than one!

Small children seem to love collecting tiny things, and this group was no exception.  They carefully collected every pebble, shell and pine cone from the rosemary, then sorted and explored them.  (The long conical shells at the top of this picture turn out to be "unicorn horn shells".  Who would have known?)

Seeing the kiddos sorting, we grabbed out some trays and had them work together to separate all the materials - wonderful for us, because we were planning to sort it all out to put it away when the children were done.

There was one more fantastic learning opportunity today, but I'm not a skilled enough photographer to capture it well: we introduced the children to maple seeds.  If there was a maple tree anywhere in your neighborhood as a child, you may remember them as "helicopter seeds" - when tossed in the air they spiral down like little helicopters.  I had collected hundreds of them while walking this last week, and the children were, of course, fascinated.  There were 8 - 10 children at a time on the carpet throwing seeds up in the air, and laughing and jumping as they watched them spiral down.

Natural materials like these are free, just laying around at our feet, waiting for us to remember the wonder of being a child scientist, to joyfully explore and discover.

May all our days be filled with helicopter seeds, unicorn horn shells, and the laughter of children!