Saint Andrews Discovery : November 2017

Turkeys, cornucopias, oh my!

This week we learn more about all things Thanksgiving
(and it will be continued next week!)

I started the lesson with a really fun book that the kids enjoyed: The Night Before Thanksgiving for my older friends

And for my youngest friends, we read My First Thanksgiving

Image result for My First Thanksgiving book

I asked the children what they think of when they think of Thanksgiving. Then we talked about many years ago when the first Europeans sailed across the ocean on the Mayflower and landed in America. We call them Pilgrims.

We discussed that the Mayflower had to FLOAT well on the ocean to get them to America safely. We did a float and sink experiment with my youngest explorers that they loved. (Pictures below)

The Pilgrims explored the area, already inhabited by the Indians, and began to learn many things from one another. The Indians helped the early settlers learn how to hunt, to trade, and to find and grow food - essentials to life in America.

In honor of their early friendship (we want to keep the lesson up-beat and I did not get into the history of early settlers and Indians) and the blessings of their lives, they celebrated the First Thanksgiving together.

We discussed that turkey is probably just one of the foods they might have had - they most likely had fish and deer and various vegetables, berries, and nuts. But most of us eat turkey today at Thanksgiving.

We then focused on all things TURKEY!

We learned that males and females look very different. Males are called "Gobblers" or "Toms" and they are bigger, brighter (feathers), and must strut in front of the females to earn their favor. Females are called "Hens" and they are smaller, more dull/brown, and are the ones who choose their mate.

We learned that males are the ones that "gobble" and females cluck. Miss Marion demonstrated a true gobbling sound - a secret skill. haha!

We learned to identify different parts of the turkey.

We pretended to have snoods, wattles, and beaks. It was very funny!

We also learned about cornucopias. A long time ago, farmers would fill empty sheep's horns with the bounty from their farms and give thanks. We add the modern cornucopia to our Thanksgiving meal in honor of this tradition to give thanks for our food and family and health.

I am grateful to all my friends at Saint Andrews Preschool for their wise little minds and I look forward to spending many more classes together - learning, exploring, and discovering!

Here are our friends exploring our Thanksgiving-related centers this week...

Nocturnal Animals

(And Diurnal Animals, like us!)

When the children came into the Discovery classroom this week, it was dark and there were night sounds coming from the tree! We heard crickets and frogs and even an owl. We also had several nighttime visitors: an owl, a raccoon, an opossum, and a bat - we got to touch each of them if we wanted (they were pretending, no worries)! We learned that these are all NOCTURNAL animals (our Word of the Week)! These animals are active at night and sleep during the day. (But we also learned they can come out during the day if they are hungry - or sick.)

Examples of nocturnal animals: Owls, bats, raccoons, opossums, spiders, cats (yes, even though they sometimes try to get on our schedule), mice, skunks, and even beaver - and more!

Diurnal animals, in contrast, like us, play during the day and sleep at night while nocturnal creatures hunt and explore.

Examples of diurnal animals were pretty easy for us to think of (we just had to think of animals we see during the day when we're outside playing): cows, dogs (even though their ancestors, the wolf, can be nocturnal), deer, ducks, songbirds, sheep, honeybees, elephants, giraffes, etc.

The (nocturnal) mammal we focused on today was THE BAT.

We learned that bats are mammals like us - they have live babies and the mom feeds them milk. We learned that bats sleep upside down and that their wings are NOT like birds - no feathers and the parts of the wings are actually more like fingers and an arm than a bird's wing. Bats use something called ECHOLOCATION to locate objects and potential food. We demonstrated echolocation in the classroom and we got to pretend we were bats! We learned that bats can eat hundreds of mosquitoes in one night. That makes us appreciate bats! Bats are fairly harmless and can avoid hitting us by sight or echolocation (hearing).

This was the week of Halloween, so we had a few, interesting visitors during class...

I didn't get many pictures this week as I had my hands full with our visitors (pretend - but the kids were believing they were amazing & real!) but did grab a few cute ones...