Dinosaur Week: 9/27-10/1

Let's talk dinosaurs! So to start off dinosaur week I thought I'd try introducing the letter A again and see how Charlotte would respond but I switched it up a little to try and make it more interesting.

So on the chalkboard I wrote a whole bunch of uppercase letters and had her circle all the A's and then we did it again with lowercase letters and then again with a mixture of the two. She loved it and she was great at it, she found all the A's every single time.

 I also decided to make her a book with the letters in it. I read recently that when people describe letters as big and little instead of uppercase and lowercase kids can get confused because an uppercase A can be smaller than a lowercase A depending on the text so we went through our magazines (that we have specifically set aside for cutting the dickens out of) and cut out A's. I think also since there is a bit of room left on the page we will cut out pictures of things that start with A and glue them on the page as well. Right now I'm not worried about her being able to write the letters, as long as she recognizes them I'll be happy!

She made a dinosaur puppet out of a paper plate, I cut out the neck and tail she cut out the head and legs and glued it all together. She made two puppets and I made one of my own so we have a little herd to play with.

 Here's the activity I'm most proud about because I was trying to trick her and it worked! I got these foam stickers from the Dollar Tree, almost forgot I had them, and was planning on using them for sorting but decided to make theses activities instead. The second match the dinosaurs sheet was the one I intended on tricking her with. It has pairs of dinosaurs but the dinosaurs are different colors but the colors will match up with a different type of dinosaur. I was having a battle in my head about whether or not to have her match the dinosaurs or the colors but figured she already knows her colors so that would be pretty easy for her, so matching the dinosaurs it was! She did exactly what I thought she would do and tried to match the colors but after I told her to match the dinosaurs and we did the first one together she got the hang of it. I honestly thought the pattern one would be the hardest since I couldn't fit a more complete pattern on the paper but she got them all right (she had the answers on the side to choose from)

Our last craft from dinosaur week is yet to be completed, we got a book from the library about pterosaurs and Charlotte went through it (with her newly acquired magnifying glass from Grandpa T) and picked out the pterosaur she liked the best. I cut the body out from a milk jug and was planning on using polymer clay to make the head but when I went to pull the clay out I couldn't find it so I will have to do some more searching for it and then we will be able to finish her pterosaur (even though it looks pretty cool hanging in the window the way it is now...) By the way, the one she liked the best is called Thalassodromeus sethi.

Like always we checked out some books from the library. I didn't know very much about dinosaurs so we checked out A LOT of books on the subject (21 to be exact) here are some of our favorites:

The Dinosaur Egg Mystery

Edwina, The Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct

Pterosaurs: Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age

Whatever Happened to the Dinosaurs?

How Big Were the Dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs

Prehistoric Actual Size

I enjoyed dinosaur week very much. We didn't get too specific into all the different dinosaurs and everything about them just the basic stuff like: some dinosaurs were carnivores and others were herbivores, dinosaurs lived a long time ago, they were reptiles and talked about some basic dinosaurs that everyone knows such as Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops etc. I'm planning on touching bases again on dinosaurs when she gets a bit older and hopefully we'll do a dino dig in the yard, talk about fossils, what Earth was like back then and so on but mainly I want to repeat dinosaurs so we can make a whole bunch of these!

Come back next week when emotions will be running high in our house for Emotions Week!