Roooooaaaarrrr!

This week we learned about dinosaurs and also celebrated St. Patrick's Day on Thursday.  We read a book about St. Patrick's Day and learned why we have this green day in March.  For a fun math activity, the K-kids sorted Lucky Charms cereal and graphed how many of each marshmallow shapes they had in their cup.  It was a tasty way to practice sorting, graphing, and comparing results!

The Kindergarten friends had so much fun learning about dinosaurs this week!  We started the unit by beginning a K-W-L chart.  A K-W-L chart is a great way to help children build and activate background knowledge about a subject.  The first step is to create a list of everything we think we know (that's the "k").  We will then make a list of everything we want to to know (that's the "w").  At the end of the unit, we will make a list of everything we learned about dinosaurs (the "l").  Creating the K-W-L not only helped the kids establish background knowledge, but it also helped me understand what most of the students knew so the content did not have to be repeated and taught again.

Through books and discussion, the kids started to recognize the differences between herbivores and carnivores.  They recognized that most of the herbivores had longer necks and rounder bellies and the carnivores tended to be fast and had sharp teeth.  We made a magazine collage of the different foods the two types of dinosaurs would eat.  They made paper bag puppets of the two different types of dinosaurs and made sure they used sharp pointy teeth for the carnivore and flat teeth for the herbivore.  They practiced writing those long words too!

We also read a book about Sue, the most complete and best preserved T-Rex ever discovered that is housed at the Field Museum in Chicago.  The kids were very interested in how and where they found the bones and how they were able to put the bones together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  The Kindergarten kids all had different theories about how Sue died, and it was interesting and exciting hear them use their prior learning into their theories!

Research projects went home this weekend for homework!  Your help will give your child a great start to this new process of finding facts and identifying the difference between a fact and fiction.  On Monday, we will collect the research and begin to compile our reports.  The kids will find a picture using the internet and will learn how to do a google search, copy the picture, and print the picture on the computer.  They will also make their first trip to the computer lab to use KidPix to draw a picture of their assigned dinosaur.  Thank you again for your help this weekend collecting the facts with your child about his/her assigned dinosaur!rs old, 40 feet long and 13 feet high…SUE is the largest, most complete and best preserved T. rex ever discovered!