Dino Time!

 The dino sized snow storm may have lost us a day of preschool this week but we made up for it in dino sized fun!  We made lots of dinosaur skeletons using Q-tips and cut out pictures of skulls to assemble our own dinosaur creations.

We played a lot of dinosaur movement games this week too and stomped and jumped and flew and crunched!

 The books we read this week and songs we sang were both informative and silly.  Some books helped us learn terms and vocabulary or types of food dinosaurs ate and others just helped us chomp and stomp and count forwards and backwards.

 We used letter and number puzzles to build pictures of dinosaurs by placing cut strips in sequential order to make the picture of the dinosaur appear.  Take any pictures or photos you have and cut them into strips to make a puzzle appropriate for preschoolers and number the strips or write letters to spell a word across the strips for an easy math or pre-reading activity.  

As the child puts the picture together they can use the numbers as clues for what piece goes next and if the word matches the picture they can learn what letters make up the word.  Like we always will tell you, having your preschooler help you with this project will only help foster their interest in working on their skills.

We used shapes to add heads, feet, tails and scales to half circles made out of paper plates.  Some students wanted to add lots of scales while others only wanted a head and feet.  This was their dino creation so we ended up with a variety of dinosaurs.

We not only did some product art like the dinosaurs that would turn out like dinosaurs no matter which way the preschooler created them to some process art with dot markers that were completely open to the children's interpretation of a dinosaur.  Lots of our young preschoolers ended up with tons of dots on their page while the older preschoolers are able to picture the shape of dinosaurs in their mind and space out their dots on the page in an appropriate order. 

 We counted dinosaurs on pages and matched the correct numeral to the amount we counted and also worked on dino themed patterns as well.

 We also learned about fossils and used dino toys to make tracks on play dough and sometimes laid the toy on its side to see what marks that made in the dough as well.

What's Coming Up?
Hard to believe we only have 2 weeks left of preschool this semester!  This week we will talk about winter and the cold weather too as we get ready for the soon approaching winter break.

Don't forget to let us know if any other children will be attending our holiday party on December 14th.  We want to make sure Santa is prepared for all children at the party.