What do YOU think about dinosaurs..?

GOOD question!  Especially for a group of preschoolers, some of whom know lots of facts about them and others for whom dinosaurs remain sort of a far off, pretend, fairy tale subject.  We sort of combined these two modes of thinking, as should happen for that developing preschool mind.

Below, we traced "life sized" stencils of dinosaur feet and pondered whether a dinosaur could fit into our classroom . . .

Barely visible after some strong winds, there was the faint outline of a dinosaur's footprint just outside our outside door Monday morning!

We mixed up some salt-dough and created our own fossils.

Hazel and Colin's dinosaurs had a little confrontation.

Noe formed some eggs!

The T/Th group ate snack with their dinos . . .

Sinh compared the attributes of the dinosaurs' appearance:  whether they have spikes on their backs, whether they walk on one leg or four . . . great observations!

Noe enjoyed tracing the footprints - takes a bit of skill . . .

The MWF group took turns bringing a dinosaur to the meeting area for us to sort them and note their differences.  We talked about which ones ate meat and which were vegetarians.  The long necks were compared to giraffes.

Thanks for sharing your book, Lucas!

We talked about what we already knew about these creatures and what we wanted to know . . .

We also used the footprint templates to print some cool looking footprints.

We took some old adding machine tape to  measure and visualize how long some dinosaurs were.

THEN we measured ourselves.  We constructed unifix blocks trains to further visualize our lengths.  This was a bit of hard work and also took some fine muscle strength to put the block trains together.

Additionally, we broke these trains into groups of tens so that we could easily count them and compare our lengths to each other and the dinosaur.  The MWF group has been working on visualizing and counting by 10's as we count the number of days we have come to preschool.

I originally brought the dollhouse in to help the children visualize how small a house would look to a dinosaur.  They enjoyed playing "house" with the plastic dinos.  This sort of play is SUPER for getting the children to have wonderful pretend conversations with each other via the dinosaurs and plastic people!

Mud Kitchen re-opened as the kids realized there was some great mud under the rocks!

Noe made "cupcakes."

The T/Th group made "indoor" mud with some pudding . . .

"Hold the bowl while I stir, ok Lucas?"  We count to 10 as we stir.

Hmmm, colorful "dinosaur eggs" in our "mud!"

What does the T/Th group think about those dinosaurs? (very age appropriate!)

After playing with the dinos a lot, Sinh decided they needed a bath.

On Friday we enjoyed more play acting of the Three Billy Goats Gruff!  Ava you are a great Troll!

We constructed our own versions of the bridge the billy goats trip trap over.

Later we talked about other versions of the story, like, how could the Troll have behaved a bit nicer...

A busy and productive week!