The Letter D

This week was one of those insanely crazy weeks at our house, so our letter D activities were slightly curtailed. We chose to focus on ducks, dinosaurs and dirt and started out by making D ducks. The boys loved gluing on the feathers and both chose to make very colorful ducks!

I had planned on taking the boys to the duck pond, but our field trip was rained out. We made due with reading our favorite duck books by Tad Hills, Jez Alborough and Doreen Cronin. Will's favorites are Duck & Goose and Duck, Duck, Goose by Tad Hills, but Henry loves the silly antics of the duck in Duck in the Truck and other duck stories by Jez Alborough. The science museum had a special "Dino Days" festival last Saturday that had been on my calendar for months. The boys were so excited to go meet Buddy from Dinosaur Train and explore their favorite museum, but Henry had a croupy cough Friday night, so we opted not to share our germs with the rest of the world. We read lots and lots of dinosaur books instead. We have many many dinosaur books at home, but the boys' absolute favorite is Dinosaurumpus by Tony Mitton. We have read this book so many times that every person in our house (including Henry) has it memorized!

We also made a lowercase d into a door and tucked a dinosaur sticker inside so that when you open the door, you see the dinosaurs.

Cute, right?

Next we got out the moon sand kit we got for Will's birthday. The boys loved hiding the little dinosaur fossils in the sand in the mold and then digging them out, just like real paleontologists do.
Digging for dinosaurs in dirt tied in perfectly with our dirt investigation. We checked out a couple of books from the library (Dirt: The Scoop on Soil by Natalie Rosinsky and Jump into Science: Dirt by Steve Tomecek are good for preschoolers) and one afternoon, I set out five cups full of different soils. The boys touched gravel, sand, clay, potting soil and mulch and Will did a pretty good job describing the different textures. Next up, Will has asked to dig up some dirt to search for earthworms! I think we'll try that next week.
For our "cooking" project this week, we made dirt out of chocolate pudding and crushed chocolate cookies. The boys loved crushing the cookies with their little hammer.

We added gummy worms for fun.

The boys thought eating dirt was the best treat ever!

Even though we didn't get to all the field trips I had planned, the boys had a great time exploring dinosaurs, dirt and ducks. I can tell already that our letter projects are making a huge difference for both boys. Henry loves the alphabet and talks about everything we've done so far and what words start with the letters we've covered. Will also loves to tell everyone about all our projects and investigations. Best of all, we're all having fun with it!