Dinosaur Dig - Tails

Day 13 of Dinosaur Dig with Mother Goose Time brought us to the subject of tails.  Honestly, I wasn't quite sure how we could spend a whole day on tails alone.  But this day was so much fun!

We started our day with the discussion question: How do you think a dinosaur used it's tail?  We had just watched a BBC Walking with Dinosaurs program on Netflix and they had seen the dinosaurs use their tails as a defense.  I think their response was something like "to hit other dinosaurs with."

Since we start our school day at the table I skipped around a little bit and we started with My Dino Tail where they boys drew self portraits of what they would look like with a tail. This is such a brilliant yet simple activity.

 Lachlan's back and tail had spikes all over.

Peter really worked hard on every detail.

Here is his finished portrait.  I think I might need to save this one to enter into the County Fair.

The second part of the dino tail lesson had us grab some scarves to wear as tails.  I put a belt on each of the boys to tuck the scarves in and off they went to play as I got ready for the concept review that was supposed to be part of our Circle Time today.

We did a concept review of the number 15.  I set out 15 paper strips or "tails" and asked Peter to put them in order from 1 to 15.  I invited Peter, with his tail and all, to come into the kitchen and put these tails in order from 1 to 15.

For the lesson Where Is Your Tail? we were supposed to ask them to move about in different ways and ask them about what it would be like to have a tail.  I didn't follow this to a T but we did discuss what it would be like to have a tail.  As they were moving about playing I brought the subject up.  Peter for instance, learned an important lesson about making sure your tail is out of the way before the baby gate closes or it gets caught.  Of course, I don't think they had baby gates in the Jurassic, but it certainly made us think, that although useful, tails can certainly get in the way sometimes.

The last discussion we had was for the lesson Word Sound Tails.  This again, is a brilliant idea to go along with the topic of tails.  We talked about the tail end of words.  Lachlan and I have spent a lot of time recognizing the beginning sounds of words but not much time on the end sound.

I sat with Lachlan at the table and we sounded out and talked about the end sound of his name and of Peter's.  I wrote out the phrase "Dinosaur is no more" on a paper.  Once we discovered the end sound of Lachlan's name is the "an" part, I added that sound to the end of each of the words in the phrase.  "Dinosauran isan noan morean".  Next I added the "er" sound "Dinosaurer iser noer moreer".  We giggleed as it of course sounded quite funny.  It was a great way to introduce this concept to Lachlan.

An InLinkz Link-up

A Bunch of Dinosaur Projects

This is not my official Mother Goose Time post for the week.  But I just feel like there has been so many great dinosaur ideas that I want to at least get pictures of them up in a post.  I have posted quite a few on my Facebook page as we have done them.  So here is a review.

This first picture is actually of an Experience God Lesson.  We are studying the story of the Talents.  I buried some letters in the sand that we have been using off and on this month with our Dino Dig theme.  He was supposed to uncover a letter, tell me the letter and come up with something that starts with that letter that is important to him.  First he uncovered P but said his bicycle was special to him.  I did have a B in there so I encouraged him to keep digging.

The question we asked was, what are you afraid to lose?

Scripture reference: Mathew 25:18 But the man who had received on bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money.

Explain: God does not want us to bury the gifts he has given us.  He wants us to use them in ways to bring him glory.

Peter also said his bicycle was important to him and he didn't want to lose it.  I asked him how he was going to keep it safe?  He said he was going to bury it.  I asked him if it was buried, how would he get to ride it and enjoy it? He said he was going to dig it up, ride it and then bury it again.  Of course you are buddy.

Lachlan made a dinosaur collage.  He was suppose to make the collage on egg cut out but he opted to color it instead.  I asked him why he didn't make a collage and he said "there is just too many things to choose from I didn't know what to do."  I thought this was pretty profound for my little man.  I was glad he could put it into words.  I gave him a little more guidance and he made this awesome T-Rex with a tail.  It seems Lachlan is a bit like me, he get's overwhelmed when there are too many choices.

Next they hid under a blanket and pretended to be dino eggs.  I set a timer and when the timer went off they would hatch.  But they had to move quickly and run and hide to avoid predetors.

Perfect hiding place.

This was a great tool from Mother Goose Time this month.  They rolled the die and used BINGO markers to keep track of which dino came up on the die most.  They took turns rolling the die We got to talk about which had the most and which had the least.  Great math terms.  It was a big hit.  I would like to laminate this one to use again and again.

We had an awesome day learning all about Dinosaur tails. But I hope to dedicate a whole post to it.  So more about that later.

Now this was fun!  The boys were playing with our instruments and it made me think of our wonderful Jurassic Jam book we got this month from MGT.  Each instrument has a beat written out and easy to grasp.  So I thought I would look to the book for some pointers.

The drum beat is written out as boom, ba, boom, boom, ba.  So I had the boys hit the drum, 1, 2 pause, 1, 2, 3.  It was so much fun watching their minds and body try to keep on rhythm. 

Next the guitar is written, wikka, wikka, wak, wikka, wikka, wak.  I had them strum, strum, tap (just lightly tap the strings) strum, strum, tap.

Music is such an amazing thing for the mind and soul.  But I do not have a musical bone in my body.  So this was a so helpful for me!  It was great to be able to guide them in their use of the instruments rather than the normal "make a lot of noise" method they had been using.

I think we might even use the instruments in a pattern exercise sometime soon!

Making Old Things New

Each month the Blog Ambassador team for Mother Goose Time has a focus topic.  Something to think about, get creative about and then write about of course!  That's what we do.

This months topic has been a bit of a challenge for me.  I have seen some awesome ideas roll in from the other bloggers and have been a bit stumped myself.

Svetlana at Buzz On In came up with a couple great ones.  She added magnet strips to the awesome color cubes we got last month.  She also used a tension rod and binder rings to make busy bags that she hung behind her door.

Ever since I started using Mother Goose Time I have kept all the folder games, well, in a folder.  I have also tucked in there the games from our High Five magazines.  I always grab this folder and take it with us when we head to the cottage.  We have a little cottage at the coast we are blessed to be able to go to frequently.  There is no TV, which is great, but I always want to make sure to have plenty to do.  But this is something I have been doing a long time now, so I wanted to come up with something fresh. 

The left over MGT tools are just too good to recycle.  I have a hard time doing that.  Just recently we had a new neighbor move in with a 5 year old girl.  I dug through some of my left overs and made a little goodie bag for her.

Pinterest is full of busy bag ideas.  This if of course a great use of leftover MGT stuff.  If I had an actual daycare, I think I would put together these busy bags and give them out to the families now and then.  Maybe on a Friday or on the eve of a holiday.  A time when the families could really use them.

I just recently bought a ten drawer organizer off of Amazon. I have wanted one forever and they were on sale with free shipping.  I couldn't pass it up.  I was hoping it would make some of our old MGT stuff more accessible to use again and again.  It certainly has helped.

Here are some very simple things I have done. 

I have a reading drawer for Lachlan.  This drawer includes some early readers like Bob Books, Hooked on Phonics early reader and the I Can Read Books from the year and a half or so we have used Mother Goose Time.  This is the drawer I pull from to work on reading with Lachlan each day.

There is a huge stack there of the MGT readers.

I have the site word flowers in a flower pot on the windowsill right by the drawers.  So we can grab the site words that go along with the book to help us with our reading.  There is a copy of the site words on the back cover of each book, so we can easily figure out which ones to grab to go with the book we are reading.

I grab the letter flowers everyday as we sit at the table and we flip through them real quick like flash cards.  This was a new idea I got from one of the bloggers.  I can't remember where I read it now.  So you will just have to read them all! 

I filled one drawer with a couple of the folder games and the storytelling set from this month so we can easily grab it while at the table if we are looking for something to do.  So far I don't have it that well organized.  I need to put the little game pieces and what not in bags.  But it's a start.

Originally I did not have a drawer designated for Adam but then he designated one for himself.  For some reason, this purple drawer, one up from the bottom was calling his name.  He constantly was opening it and taking everything out.  The things in there were not baby friendly.  So rather than fight him on it, I thought I would make it all his.  I grabbed all the large manipulatives from the past few months and threw them in the drawer, plus one little rubber vine from our Lego Duplo set. 

 Needless to say he was thrilled and quickly got it open and started taking everything out. 

This certainly made these old MGT manipulatives new again for this little guy!

A couple of days ago when we got our new pattern set I did some tweaking to it to add another level of learning for Lachlan.  Lachlan has always been good at patterns but I didn't think about teaching him what the pattern is called.  Like and AB pattern or ABC.  But a few months ago we were doing patterns with our neighbor and she said, oh yeah, that's an ABB pattern.  I thought hmm, that would be a neat thing for him to be able to recognize, not just the pattern but the type of pattern.

So I flipped over the pattern pieces and wrote A, B, C, D on the backs of them.

I put A on all the eggs, B on all the small Mussaurus', C on the big Mussaurus and a D on all the fossil pictures.

It turned the set into a double sided pattern set.  In the pictures below I had Lachlan set up an ABC pattern.  First with the letters up.  Then I had him flip them over.  As he flipped them over and saw the same pattern imerge with the pictures I could see a little grin form on his face.  It certainly was beginning to make more sense to him.  It was a great way to connect what he already knew about patterns with this new concept of pattern types. 

An InLinkz Link-up

Dinosaur Dig - Week 1

Dinosaur Dig is right up our alley.  We have many dinosaur themed items around this house but we have gained some great additions to our collection so far this week.

Day 1 we learned about Paleontologists and received our Field Journal.  I gave Lachlan his journal with no instructions, just to see what he would do.  He loved it and started coloring right away.  Mother Goose Time provided them each with a small pack of crayons along with their journal this month.  Lachlan was quite fond of them. 

After spending some time coloring and enjoying the journals I asked them to make some observations.  I asked them to observe the dinosaurs and write down their observations.

Peter noticed that the Brontosaurus had a long neck and asked how to write it.  So I wrote it out on a paper for him to follow.

Lachlan made some observations about the Mussaurus.  He was drawing arrows up and down and seemed to be documenting their movement. 

On Day 1 we also got our Dino Nametags and MGT had a brilliant idea.  Instead of just writing their names write their dino names.  We added saurus to the end of their name to get their dino name.

 I wrote it in pencil and Peter started tracing over it with a marker. 

On Day 2 we got out our Nametags and worked on putting the letters from our name in order in the lesson called Letter Fossils.  First I made letter "rocks" out of brown paper with all the letters in Petersaurus' name on them.  Then I buried them face down in the sand we had out for the Excavation Dig lesson we had done earlier. (The Excavation Dig lesson had us dig out paper dino bones from the sand and put them together, you can see the remnants of it in the lower right hand corner of the picture.)

Peter used his brush to dig out the letters and then put them in order.  He felt quite accomplished.

Adam did some digging of his own when he discovered the towel drawer.  My towels will never be folded again.  To say he was proud of himself would be an understatement. 

 Day 3 we made Fossil Dough for the Fossil Press lesson.  This is such a cool recipe.  It is made with used coffee grounds and cold coffee!?!?  Of course salt and flour is also included to bind it all together.  Obviously with these ingredients the dough is going to have an aroma but it also has a cool texture.  It's pretty rough.  The color goes great with the fossil/dirt concept. 

 Peter used his small Triceratops to make foot prints in his dough. 

Peter played with this stuff forever.  He made a snake and an egg but he didn't want them to sit out to get hard.  He wanted to keep it soft so he could play with it more later.  I put his creations in a Tupperware container and they kept pretty well.  They got more moist and we had to add more flour.  Since we were adding flour I threw in a little cinnamon.  I wanted to see if it would improve the smell for Lachlan's sake, he didn't play with it long because of the smell. 

Lachlan made a quick "pointy egg" and called it good.  He wanted his baked to make it hard.

I have to say, it made me giggle every time I passed it.  I know he said it was an egg . . . but I don't know.  It certainly did come out of that end.  :)

On Day 4 we got out new book!  This month it is called Jurassic Jam by Maria West.  Just in case you don't recognize that name, she is the amazing dancer and choreographer behind Dance N Beats.  Now she can add author to her list of expertise. 

It's such a cute story, not your typical Dinosaur story.  It's about dancing dinos of course.  It has a fun rhythm that flows through the whole book. 

Just recently Mother Goose Time has began a relationship with Amazon and you can now buy their books.  In the past the only way to get it was through a MGT kit.  So this is exciting stuff!  Here is a link (affiliate link)