I love mama blogs because of all of the wonderful shared tips on teaching and playing with little ones. So I thought I'd share some of our own recent activities we thought offered loads of learning and just plain fun. Click on the high-lighted words in the following text to link to some of my favorite resources for teaching at home. Isn't the Internet awesome?
A couple of weeks ago L and I started discovering the world of dinosaurs together. She had seen these creatures on Curious George and in a Dr. Suess book and had become curious. Target happened to have some plastic dinos (complete with buttons that make them shriek) in their dollar bins around the same time, so I thought I'd bring some home for a weeklong lesson on jurassic animals. That week turned into almost a month of dinosaur exploration in books; digging for fossils in the back yard; digging for dino bones in the pool, sandboox, beach; and we even found a dinosaur shop on vacation in Cocoa Beach that had some real fossils to view. Wow!
We made our own "fossils" out of a coffee salt dough, which turned out pretty cool. Here are the instructions. We baked ours at 300 degrees for about 20 minutes just to firm them up a bit.
We also printed out coloring pages of various friendly dinosaurs to help us learn their lengthy names and hung them from our playroom ceiling.
Our children's librarian recommended some dinosaur titles geared toward pre-school-aged learners who are fearful of big things with sharp teeth and angry eyes. We opted for more scientific and friendly illustrations. The non-scary books we liked included: "Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones!" by Byra Barton; "Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs!" also by Barton; "Dinosaurs" by Gail Gibbons; "How Big Were the Dinosaurs?" by Bernard Most; "Dinosaur Questions" also by Most and, of course, C and L adore the personification of the baby dino in Sandra Boynton's "Dinosaur's Binkit."
Happy digging!
I have noticed that minus one little 3 year old, you have time to put up some great blogs. Maybe catch up on your emails to friends and get some crafts started or finished? I love it. We're having such a sweet time...
ReplyDeleteWe are way into dinos as well! Such fun. B purposely prefers the scary ones at the library. so boy. His favorite pretend activity is to be a "dino egg" and hatch...then grow into a big dino. There's a great book called Dinosaurs and the Bible Mystery (or something). It's more for you to read, and then it gave me a great biblical understanding of dinos to chime in when B and I are reading other books.
ReplyDeleteI love keeping up with you on our blogs! You're such a great mom!!