Tot School - Dinosaur Theme

This is my fifth week of participating in Tot School by posting my learning activities with my two boys who are 29 and 52 months of age. Through reading the posts from Tot School I found a wonderful blog called Homeschool Creations who sponsors Preschool Corner.

Since I usually work with both of my boys at the same time and there is a two year age gap, I realize that some of my content my not be age appropriate for some of the tots in Tot School and would be a better fit for Preschool Corner so I figured it would be okay to post to both sites at the same time (I hope that is okay with everyone).

Since this is my first post for Preschool Corner I would formally like to introduce myself. Please feel free to read my first Tot School post here to read about my boys and what my goals and plans for teaching them are.

Dinosaur Theme Week

The little guy worked all week on a little dinosaur song that we learned from Kid Soup about colors and dinosaurs. I also printed the dinosaurs from there (I never did have a chance to properly cut them out or laminate them).

Also from my Kid Soup membership, I printed counting mats with pictures of dinosaurs with numbers for the big guy. We used our dog's biscuits as dinosaur bones (I wanted to paint them white for a better dinosaur bone effect but was afraid that my dog would get a hold of them).

The big guy tried his hand at tracing objects for the first time using our old Discovery Toys Place & Trace. He still needs a little more coordination with using markers before he can master the task.

The little guy worked on the "puzzles", especially the dinosaur one.

When the boys were sleeping I traced the dinosaur templates on black construction paper with a thin line of Elmer's Glue when once it dried made it very hard to see the images. In the morning I told the boys that there was "fossils" on the paper and gave them chalk to rub on the paper, revealing the dinosaur shapes.

The big guy made a paper plate volcano as a prop for his plastic dinosaurs.

This by far was the kid's favorite book of the week as David Carter pop-up books usually are. This book usually shows up at bedtime several times a week. Both boys love it.

I hid these "Treasure Stones" in our garden for the boys first to find, then break open to find little dinosaurs inside. To see my whole post on our Treasure Stones go here.

We played alot with our dinosaur counters this week,

I photocopied pages from the booklet (and laminated them) that came in our bucket of dinosaur counters for the big guy to use as sorting mats. I thought he was going to have trouble with it as he really had to sit and look hard at the line drawings and match the plastic counters to the pictures but he sailed right through it!

The little guy sorted them by color.

Here are some of the other books we focused on this week:

I still have lots of dinosaur themed things planned but unfortunately ran out of time this week. I will save them for the next time that dinosaurs come into out rotation. In the mean time, if you are interested to see what other parents are doing to teach their kids please stop by Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1.