September 28 - Fossils

The kids had a great time fooling around with fossils today. Thanks to Lara for the real fossils that we put in our counting box. And this was my first time seeing the completed Circle Time board. Fabulous job, Andrea and Becca!

Oh, by the way, I bought a wooden counting box with a chalkboard top. After we counted the fossils, we wrote our number (today it was 9) on the top of the box. I hadn't planned on it, but the kids all ended up taking turns writing their own little 9's on the chalkboard as well. Very cute.

Our letter of the day once again was F (repetition is good, right?) so we started off fingerprinting some large cutouts of the letter F.

We then started to make hand imprints, but I quickly realized that the air-dry clay I was using was way too stiff for their little hands to even make a small dent in it, so I broke out the pack of dinosaurs I'd been saving for Thursday and we made dinosaur tracks through the clay. Some of the kids really got into it and started mashing in dino heads and bodies (their own little La Brea tar pits!). The clay "tar pits" are drying right now, but they'll get them on Thursday.

The finished product!

Since the hand imprints hadn't quite worked out as planned, we used playdoh to make imprints in (much more squishy!) and then poured Plaster of Paris in them to make little hand-shaped fossils. Those should also be dry in time to be taken home on Thursday.

And finally, the kids got to be archaeologists and do their own "fossil dig" using grapefruit spoons to chisel small plastic animals encased in "stone" (i.e. ice). Notice the mitten "work gloves."

Eve was really getting into it . . .

. . . while Maylie took a more novel approach . . .

All in all, lots of fun was had by everyone. However, I think the thing the kids enjoyed most was watching the Vienna Public Works crew stop by to do a special trash pick-up!