Dinosaur Math!

This month has been all about dinosaurs! We are enjoying learning about different types of dinosaurs & the world they lived in long ago. I've become a huge fan of our preschool curriculum and I recommend it to many of my friends for this age group. At two years old, our girls are learning so much and having a great time too! Not to mention it's still relevant and interesting to our five year old (although I don't recommend it as a stand-alone curriculum for kindergarten). 
So what are we using? Mother Goose Time preschool curriculum with a Little Goose adapted guide for younger children (like the girls).  Mother Goose Time comes every month in a fun yellow bus box which is super exciting for our kiddos. I write about our experiences with Mother Goose Time here on the blog in exchange for our packages but all opinions and stories are my own.

What are they actually learning? Each day we start with a short circle time discussion and a fun themed calendar, then we have a community "challenge," an art project, a literacy activity, a story, a song, and a math activity. Today I want to talk about some of our favorite math activities so far this month.

Lesson 7 of 20 focused on learning about the stegosaurus. Despite promptly notifying me that a stegosaurus is his least favorite kind of dinosaur, Noah jumped right on board with the day's math activity and all the children had fun helping each other add spikes to the back of the stegosaurus. They were all excited to reach 17 spikes (In case you didn't know, a real stegosaurus had 17 spikes!). This activity helped introduce the girls to number concepts and served as listening comprehension for Noah.

Lesson 12 of 20 focused on learning about dinosaur heads. After having lots of fun dancing around in our dinosaur headbands with sharp t-rex teeth, the children had fun learning about patterns with the awesome dinosaur counters Mother Goose Time sent this month. Each month we get fun, themed counting manipulatives to help the children with their math activities. It's probably one of their favorite yellow bus box items each month. Today, we worked together to make different dinosaur patterns. Ada Grace truly enjoyed the pattern guide included with today's activity.

Lesson 13 of 20 was all about dinosaur tails (easily the most fun part of the dinosaur). The kids spent all day wearing around homemade tails and pretending to be dinosaurs. Noah even fell asleep in his tail! The math activity for this lesson involved building tails for various dinosaurs from the plastic links we received earlier in the month. All the children worked hard to find the right colors and attach them to the dinosaurs while building sorting skills as well as fine motor skills.

Stay tuned to hear about how Tray Plays and STEAM Stations help foster community by giving our kids opportunities to explore & work together in next week's post.