Fossil play dough

The theme for this week is “Fabulous Fossils”. We are going to learn about fossils and focus on dinosaurs. Today, we welcomed Zachary who used to come to Ohana. Welcome back Zachary! Dominik and Koh started to play with dinosaur toys. There are many kinds of dinosaurs, but we didn’t know each name very well. We will look up our books in the library and learn their names both in English and Japanese later this week. Today’s first activity was making special fossil play dough. Jennifer, Koh, Lisa and Zachary sat on the big table with Liezel. What made this play dough special was our special ingredient…coffee! They all said their moms and dads like to drink coffee except Koh’s dad. First, Liezel placed coffee filter in the big cup. Then she poured some water and made cold coffee. “Umm…” smelled so good. All the teachers also liked the coffee smell. When Maryna came down from the office, she also noticed this good smell. The rest of the recipe was same as usual, flour, salt and water. We added cold coffee and ground coffee into our play dough. And that was it! We all love this special play dough because it smells coffee and has ground coffee texture.

With this fossil play dough, some of us made dinosaurs eggs. We covered small dinosaurs toys with our fossile play dough. We wondered how big real dinosaurs eggs are . Teachers looked our dinosaurs book and told us that they aren’t so big as we think. The biggest one was only about 30 cm (maybe about someone’s daddy’s foot size ) .Some are even smaller than ostrich eggs.

 At the small table, we made dinosaur fossils with paper clay. We used roller to make the clay nice and flat .When we used the roller, we also placed two pencils outside the clay, so that we all could make them same width, not too thin or thick. When they all dry, we will color them with paint.

After snack time, Ayaka asked us what a fossil really is. We could think of fossils, like dinosaur’s skeletons and large bones, but there are many different types of fossils. Ayaka showed us dinosaur, bird, fish, dragon fly and leaf fossil pictures. Fossils are the remains of once living animals or plants. We also talked about dinosaurs. None of us has ever seen them in the zoo. William said we can’t see dinosaurs because they live in Africa. Luka also said they show up when we are sleeping at night. But the truth is they all died long time ago. We can’t see them, but learn about them from fossils.

Ayaka read a Japanese dinosaur book. It was about little boy Iguanodon Pepe’s story. Pepe is a grass-eating dinosaurs (herbivore), so when the season changes and there is not enough grass, he and his family needed to move to a new place.

Just before we went up for our pool play, we made dinosaur picture with stickers. There are Stegosaurus, Pteronodon and Triceratops. It’s not easy to remember all the dinosaurs’ names, but we will learn more about them later this week.

It was really hot today so we made sure to drink our water often. We like sunny day but don’t like too hot day. Please bring us nice warm weather tomorrow! Stay cool ;)