Little Hive's Love of Dinosaurs Stomps into the Classroom
One of our Little Hive classrooms has transformed into an aspiring paleontologist’s dream!
Mrs. Rainer and Mrs. McKnatt's girls have been talking about dinosaurs since the first week of school, so the teachers turned their classroom into a place where they could learn all about them while practicing important skills.
By reading books about dinosaurs in the classroom library, the girls are getting more hands-on experience with turning pages and learning from illustrations. They are practicing storytelling as they play in the sensory bin with dinosaur figurines and fake snow, strengthening their language skills and literacy development in telling ideas.
The girls are recognizing and comparing shapes by using them to fill in dinosaur outlines. They are also having fun putting together puzzles, which helps them with concentrating and seeing how parts can make up a whole. They are practicing their fine motor skills as they dig for fossils in sand and rescue toy dinosaurs from tape traps. Mrs. Rainer said the girls love tape!
Another skill they are working on is slowing down and taking a closer look as they create artwork showing their observations Mrs. Rainer said they are focusing on capturing what they see, not just what they imagine, of dinosaurs in a forest habitat. Then, they are adding watercolor paint to show more details. The girls are also tapping into their creativity by drawing dinosaur skin textures with colored pencils and sculpting dinosaurs with model magic clay and toothpicks.
Focusing on our girls’ interest in dinosaurs is an example of how our early childhood teachers follow a Reggio Emilia-inspired approach to learning, which encourages each girl to engage in exploratory learning to gain both knowledge of herself and the world around her.