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?!

Insects, bugs and things that creep

Oh yes, we got buggy this week!  This is a great time of year to learn about insects, and it seemed natural to follow up our caterpillar and butterfly learning by learning about other insects.  Do I even need to  tell you that the children loved it?!

In between our insect books (both fiction and non-fiction, of course!) we sang a song about insect body parts: Head, Thorax, Abdomen, and labeled a large diagram with the parts mentioned in the song.  Fun!  We saw pictures - including a life size drawing - of one of the biggest insects to ever live on earth, the meganeura.  Meganeura looked like a dragonfly, but it was up to 36 inches from wing tip to wing tip!  While the adults in the room seemed to all be grateful it is extinct (it lived 300 million years ago), we had the children graph whether or not they would like to meet one, and they overwhelmingly said yes!

We also had a live ladybug visit us, along with a nice supply of aphids for it to eat. (Unfortunately they all came from my oleander bush, which is yellow with aphids in some places.)  I need all the ladybug help I can get in my garden!

We also had ladybug dough play, with black beans to make spots.  We revisited a word we worked on last week, symmetry, and enjoyed the feeling of mushy dough and hard, slick beans.

We're going to use the dough again next week to make our own fossil type imprints, so a couple of kiddos borrowed their parents' phones again to take pictures of their creations.  I love seeing them remember this idea from past story time sessions!

We had out lots of magnifying glasses, plastic insects, informational cards and the like, as well as puzzles, all out of one of the early learning kits that are available for check out.

The most popular use of the plastic insects was the dirt sensory bins - with tall, tall grass, just like in Denise Flemings' book.  We set 5 of these sensory bins up on the patio outside our community room, so our families could enjoy the spring sunshine along with the bugs and dirt. 

While enjoying the sensory play bins outside, some of the children helped me to look on the day lilies for "evidence" of bugs.  We found some!  The children told me they think these petals were chewed by caterpillars, probably very hungry caterpillars!

Finally, since we did read In The Tall, Tall Grass, we followed it up with making our own tall, tall grass, an idea I saw here.  The children glued on words, wrote their names, fringe cut the paper to make "grass", and decorated it with brightly colored insects.

So much fine motor development, preparing those little fingers for writing and much, much more!

Next week we'll learn about another kind of animal that is extinct - and much bigger than the insects.  Can you guess what it is?  Come back next week to see what we learn!

St. Patrick's Day STEAM

How fun that St. Patrick's Day actually fell on a story time day!  We had a LOT of friends show up wearing green, sporting shamrocks, and telling stories about catching leprechauns (or trying to)! 

I wanted to make sure we talked about leprechauns and their pots of gold, so we read  Tomie DePaola's Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, and Clever Tom and the Leprechaun by Linda Shute.   I was really impressed with how well the children listened and participated, as the books are a little longer.  They did an awesome job - I think their families had prepared them well for some St. Patrick's Day learning.

We always sing Aiken Drum at Thursday's story time - and each child gets a ladle and a stick. As they sing along they "play upon a ladle", just like Aiken Drum!  This week we also sang along to  "Mother Goony Bird", performed by Dr. Jean, and sang a song about the colors in a rainbow.  I used this song as a basis, but modified the words slightly - in the song the last two colors are purple and pink, and I wanted to teach the kiddos two new words, the real rainbow colors: indigo and violet!

Then it was time to explore our fun activities!  For our tactile kiddos we offered some fun homemade green playdough with all kinds of treasure to hide in it.  We actually used this dough the day before as well, for a Play to Grow storytime, and it stood up to all the use really well. 

 

I looked at so many dough recipes, I can't remember where I finally found this one.  I did cook this dough, and used vinegar to replace cream of tartar in the recipe (substitute 2 parts vinegar for 1 part cream of tartar).  I've found cooked doughs to be nicer and to last longer.

For our math learning, we had counting with rainbows, little green hats, pots of gold and shamrocks.

I put shiny green glass shapes, plus green and white pompons, and saw lots of our friends carefully counting them out to match the numbers on the cards. 

I love how some children preferred the smooth glass counters, and others picked out the pompons!

Our last activity followed up the Rainbow song we sang, by making rainbows with tissue paper and glue.

This activity is satisfying in so many ways - it is super simple, so the kiddos can do it themselves, the colors are bright and pretty and quickly fill up the page, we use glue sticks, so we didn't have to wait for the glue to dry, and we offered crayons and pots for the children to color and put at the ends of their rainbows if they wanted to, so of course, many of them also drew details onto their pictures.  The only preparation for this activity is to cut tissue paper into strips that are about 1 1/2 inches wide.  My very favorite part - I use tissue paper that I've saved from gifts, so it is also free and recycled!  If you've attended even a couple of children's birthday parties, you know how much tissue paper is used and discarded - I just ask if it's okay for me to fold it up and use it for crafts, instead of it being thrown away.  Look how much fun our kiddos had making colorful rainbows with this reused resource!

We carried the rainbow theme over to our graph for the week: Which color of the rainbow do you like the best?

Since this post is about St. Patrick's Day, I'll finish with an Irish blessing:

May the dreams you hold dearest
Be those that come true,
The kindness you spread
Keep returning to you!