Preschoolers Explore Panama and Paleontology
Hold on to your (Panama) hats for the trip of a lifetime, and then don your pith helmets for excavating dinosaur bones!
Tomorrow, our kindergarteners will transport parents to Panama on Market Day, sharing information about the country's rich environmental resources, culture, and traditions. The students embarked on their learning journey a few weeks ago, by boarding an "airplane" in class (after passing through Immigration and Customs, of course). Since then, they've visited a mini-rainforest (in the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden) and hosted several visitors to their classroom. One pair of visitors shared slides of Panama and taught students how to cook fried plantains and play traditional Panamanian games. Another visitor, alum Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini (US'94, C'98), helped students paint large animals for their "rainforest" as well as scenery for Market Day.
Market Day is a perfect way to share the culmination of Preschool learning, as the students demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through the spoken word, writing, art, and performance.
Meanwhile, our junior kindergarteners can not only pronounce paleontology, they know what it means, too! In their unit on all things dinosaur, the class learned about fossils, where and why paleontologists dig up bones, and how to tell the difference between, say, a tyrannosaurus and an allosaurus. Students had their own in-class sandpit, where they excavated dinosaur bones, and they made clay models of these captivating creatures. The class also enjoyed a visit to the Saint Louis Science Center, where a researcher showed them the real triceratops bones he was working on. Best of all, this multi-day project helped them practice writing, art, and communication.