Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Big Kids Storytime: Winter Bears

Big Kids Storytime: Winter Bears

It's finally cold enough for wintery storytimes here! Here's what we were up to this week:

Bread and Butter
(quiet and loud today)

Letter of the Week: V
(we came up with violin, volcano, vroom, and velociraptor)

William's Winter Nap by Linda Ashman



40 Years On An Iceberg
(I learned this song decades ago in Girl Scouts and it was still a huge hit! The closest version I found is from the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada)


Polar Bear's Underwear by Tupera Tupera


Storytime Challenge
Today's challenge was all about visual discrimination and we did fantastically! We tried to find out which snowflakes were the same and which were different using this printable from Teachers Pay Teachers. 


Thursday, January 10, 2019

What I Read This Week 1/11/2019

I read 3 new (or pretty new) early readers this week that I really enjoyed. None have official Guided Reading levels yet, but all are relatively low level with lots of colorful illustrations-


Float, Flutter by Marilyn Singer
Illustrated by Kathryn Durst
(January 1, 2019)





Party Pigs! by Eric Seltzer
Illustrated by Tom Disbury
(January 1, 2019)


Space Cows by Eric Seltzer
Illustrated by Tom Disbury
(August 28, 2018)


Some more fun ones:

Otter series by Sam Garton


The Adventures of Otto series by David Milgrim


Chicken series by Adam Lehrhaupt
Illustrated by Shahar Kober
*slightly higher level, but still simple and fun


Sunday, January 6, 2019

Little Scientists: Dinovember

Little Scientists take on dinosaurs! This was one of my favorite Little Scientists sessions of the year. As usual, we started with a story (Dinosaur Bones by Bob Barner) and then broke out into stations. Here's what we were up to:



We used our math cubes to measure how tall or long pictures of dinosaurs were and then assigned some superlatives like shortest or longest.

I like using tangrams when I can- they're great for practicing fine motor skills and visual discrimination.



We also worked on estimating skills by guessing how many people could fit inside a triceratops footprint and how many steps it would take to walk from a triceratops nose to tail. (I found the printable footprint here)




We practiced our field work with shovels and then brushes to find different types of dinosaur toys.

I usually have a one-t-one correspondence activity, since it is such an important skill for future math & science success. This one matched dinosaurs with a digit to eggs with a number of dots.

Visual discrimination is also an important skill for scientists and puzzles are a great way to practice that. Each puzzle only having 2 pieces makes it easier for toddlers and preschoolers.


Having a physical activity seemed like a good idea for when the weather is so yucky. Moving around like dinosaurs fit our theme and got some energy out! I used a prize wheel from our summer reading club and added tasks like "roar like an ankylosaur" and "jump like a triceratops".

Our take-home experiment today was making your own fossils. Each scientist got air dry clay, two dinosaur figurines, and instructions on how to make their own fossils. I made sure everyone got two different figurines so the scientists could observe the differences between the fossils they made.






Mini Putt-Putt

The Very Hungry Caterpillar mini golf station at a program earlier this summer was so popular that I decided to make an entire Mini Putt-Put...