Theme: Dinosaurs
Classical composer: Guiseppe Verdi (1813 –1901) was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of Italian opera in the 19th century. We listened to some of his most famous pieces this week, such as "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto. Who can resist The Three Tenors overacting their way through the song in this clip? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A3zetSuYRg We told this story in a very preschool appropriate way (see music section below).
Spanish: el dinosaurio (dinosaur), gigante (gigantic), enorme (enormous), el Volcản (volcano), el terremoto (earthquake)
Theme:
“Dinosaurs” is such a fun theme and the children really engage in the activities. We used dinosaur stampers and tempera paint to create colorful collages of dinos. The children took to acting like their favorite dinosaurs throughout the week…some were pterodactyls, others T-rexes, etc., but each one was very adamant about their choice. One fun activity was a song called “There Are Five Dinosaurs”.
Each child starts with five and count back as the dinosaurs get stuck in the clay (see video). We talked about herbivores vs. carnivores and what that means as well as different dinosaurs that fit into each category. We also pretended to be paleontologists discovering the dinosaur fossils with our sifters and soft brushes. We talked about the environment that dinosaurs lived in complete with volcanoes and earthquakes.
One of the favorite activities was exploding our very own volcanoes using vinegar water and baking soda (see video). One child exclaimed, “I’m going to ask my mom if we can do this at home!”
Table Activities: Play-dough with dinosaur dough cutters, pretend play with plastic dinosaurs, sorting dinosaurs into same colors or same species, pegs and peg boards. 
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Music: Opera is always a fun way to act out stories. The opera song “La donna e mobile” is about a very fickle woman who has many suitors, so we changed that a bit to fit our class of friends who sometimes have a hard time choosing which friend to sit by or play with. It was fun to overact our parts and help the kids practice social skills at the same time.
Some of our favorite songs from the week include, “Dance like a Dinosaur”, “Di Dinosaurio”, “We Are the Dinosaurs”, “The Dinosaur Stomp”, and “Dickey, Dickey, Dinosaur”.
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Art: Miss Cristina introduced two new mediums today and the children created beautiful drawings using oil pastels crayons and chalk. We discussed wet and dry media, smooth and rough appearance of paintings. For example, Miss Cristina showed a painting of DaVinci’s and contrasted the smoothness of his oil-portrait with one of Degas’ pastels on paper, Blue Dancers. The children each took a turn standing in front of the class and telling the other students about their artwork. It is always amazing to observe the distinct thought-patterns and interests the students have!
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Math, Handwriting and Reading: For math, we’ve been practicing the 10s place, counting by tens, adding sets of tens together, etc. How convenient for us that this is the last week of January, so we were able to do quite a bit of number-play with tens during calendar time. We are very focused on the numbers 1-30 with occasional working up through 50 or 100. One thing we often do is use both hands open-shut for each group of ten as we count by tens. We also used pegs one day and snapping-cubes another to make groups of ten and “build” certain tens. For example, one day each student had a group of ten, linked cubes they had constructed. The teacher drew a zero in the ones place and the students called out, “Zero!” while holding up zero fingers. Then the teacher drew a number in the tens place, the students named the number and then figured out how many tens it would take to make that number. Then we would call up that many students to put their tens around the number and all count by tens up to that number while opening and shutting our hands. This was an activity that engaged the students until we had to get ready to go home. It was surprisingly fun!
For handwriting, we used the slates to practice wet-dry-try with the letters D, N, and S. We added the /f/ sound for Forté the Lion to our sounds train this week.
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Storybooks: Edwina: The Dinosaur who Didn’t Know She was Extinct, I Dreamt I was a Dinosaur, Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp, When Dinosaurs Came With Everything, I Am an Ankylosaurus, Dinosaur Roar!, Skippy Jon Jones and the Big Bones, Mister Bones (A biography of the paleontologist who found the first T-Rex in Montana), How Do Dinosaurs Go to School.
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Free-Play Fun: Lots of great train track building, building garages and structures with wooden blocks, reading books in the reading loft, playing dinosaur chase and playing with the plastic dinosaurs.
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Math, Handwriting and Reading: For math, we’ve been practicing the 10s place, counting by tens, adding sets of tens together, etc. How convenient for us that this is the last week of January, so we were able to do quite a bit of number-play with tens during calendar time. We are very focused on the numbers 1-30 with occasional working up through 50 or 100. One thing we often do is use both hands open-shut for each group of ten as we count by tens. We also used pegs one day and snapping-cubes another to make groups of ten and “build” certain tens. For example, one day each student had a group of ten, linked cubes they had constructed. The teacher drew a zero in the ones place and the students called out, “Zero!” while holding up zero fingers. Then the teacher drew a number in the tens place, the students named the number and then figured out how many tens it would take to make that number. Then we would call up that many students to put their tens around the number and all count by tens up to that number while opening and shutting our hands. This was an activity that engaged the students until we had to get ready to go home. It was surprisingly fun!
For handwriting, we used the slates to practice wet-dry-try with the letters D, N, and S. We added the /f/ sound for Forté the Lion to our sounds train this week.
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Storybooks: Edwina: The Dinosaur who Didn’t Know She was Extinct, I Dreamt I was a Dinosaur, Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp, When Dinosaurs Came With Everything, I Am an Ankylosaurus, Dinosaur Roar!, Skippy Jon Jones and the Big Bones, Mister Bones (A biography of the paleontologist who found the first T-Rex in Montana), How Do Dinosaurs Go to School.
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Free-Play Fun: Lots of great train track building, building garages and structures with wooden blocks, reading books in the reading loft, playing dinosaur chase and playing with the plastic dinosaurs.
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