Turtle Shells

Today we spent some time talking about turtles.  We learned the difference between a turtle and a tortoise.  See if your child can tell you what the difference is!  We read The Foolish Tortoise.  In the story, the tortoise did not want to carry his shell anymore so he took it off.  At first it was a relief not to carry his shell everywhere with him, but then he discovered all the important reasons why he should wear his shell.  The shell helped protect him from animals that wanted to eat him, kept him dry in the rain, provided shade from the sun, kept him warm when it was windy, and even was a place to sleep.  See if your child can tell you some of the important reasons why a turtle has a shell!

We also spent some time working on composing a thank you note to some of our guest readers that we had visit last week.  Everyone helped contribute ideas of what we should write.  First we wrote it on the dry erase board.  Once everyone agreed on the message, we copied it onto paper and then all signed our names.  In the morning session, we took some special trips to hand-deliver our thank you notes!

The children visited another center today - either making turtle suncatchers, sorting pond and ocean animals, or hopping like frogs to gather pond animals to sort, graph, and count.

Then we played in the classroom.  Several children worked on building some traps for those tricky leprechauns!  They are hoping that they will actually catch a real leprechaun!  As a matter of fact, the afternoon session had their hearts set on seeing a real leprechaun so they insisted that we whisper the entire afternoon so that we would not scare the leprechauns away!  It was a very peaceful and quiet afternoon! :)

After snack, we made some stand-up turtles to help remind us about the importance of a turtle's shell.  We made a turtle without a shell and then decorated a shell to place on top of the turtle.

Then it was time to go outside and play!

Tomorrow we will have a visit from Altrusa.  We can't wait to see what story they bring for us tomorrow!

Have a great evening!