Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Dinosaur Week - Preschool

This week's preschool workboxes focus on a dinosaur theme.  I hope you enjoy them!

Dinosaur Color Match
Clip the matching clothespins onto each dinosaur to make his legs.
I used mini paper plates and ink pads for this quick project.  You can also use more clothespins and have your child make spikes on the dinosaur's back.

Counting Dinosaurs
Place the correct number of dinosaur stickers onto each sheet of construction paper.

Dinosaur Sorting
Sort the dinosaurs by type.

Find the Dinosaur Egg
This will be a simple game of hide and seek that we will probably play over and over.  I made the toilet paper roll dinosaurs from printouts here.  The egg is a ping pong ball.

Dinosaur Alphabet Match
Match each dinosaur to the correct egg (upper & lower case matching).  Printable available here.

Side Note:  I love The Mailbox Magazine! They had an incredible sale recently, so I stocked up on some of their books and theme kits.

The next 4 activities are from one of the theme kits I purchased (available here).  The kits come pre-laminated, which is wonderful!  

What starts with D?
 Number Matching
Size Sequencing
Find the Rhymes

 Shape Identification Game
This game is from The Mailbox Magazine Mix & Match Games Book, available here.

Some of our dinosaur books:

Monday, October 1, 2012

Layers of the Earth Model

We are studying Earth Science this year and wanted to make models showing the layers of the earth.  I allowed the kids to decide what medium they wanted to use to make their models, and they both decided on dough.  We used Lakeshore Learning's Scented Dough, which is a little softer than we like, but it is easy to work with and smells good.  

The dough comes in Red, Yellow, Green, Blue & Purple.  We mixed red and yellow to make orange.

I didn't think to take pictures during the first few steps, but they each started with a yellow ball for the inner core.  Next, they surrounded the yellow ball with a layer of orange for the outer crust.  The next layer was the mantle, which they did in red.  Lastly, they covered their growing spheres in blue and added green details for the crust.  

Next, we cut the models in half to see the different layers.  This proved a little challenging, as the dough was so soft.  

The spheres smashed a little when they were cut, and the inner layers didn't stay round.  Also, the red and orange blended a bit, but we were happy with the results.  It was a simple and fun project that both kids enjoyed.