Day of the Dolphin

CRESCENDO: Friday means morning music. There are just 5 kids in the class - four boys and a girl. For the last 10 minutes of the class, parents join in. Since it's so close (a block away), I'm usually a couple of minutes early. Standing outside the door spying, one thing is clear. Annabelle is a steamroller baby (to steal a line from Elvis). She's quick (really too quick, not giving others a chance) to answer and her volume, well let's just say the word megaphone comes to mind. That said, I'm glad she is excited about music and I wouldn't want her to be a shrinking violet but gee whiz. I think we just need to have a conversation about not always having to be first - that (unless it's truly a competition) it's nice to give others a chance to participate.

SOCIAL MIXER: As has become a Friday tradition, we met Connor at the park in Magnolia for an hour of fun and games. Before Connor got there, I reminded CJ that we were at the park to play with Connor. (While this might sound like stating the obvious, if you know CJ, you know that he is predisposed to focusing his attention inward and often at a park, he will be running around playing, battling invisible bad guys and such, but it's almost always solo, or with Annabelle, and not really engaging with other kids for extended periods of time.) But boy oh boy, was today the day. From the moment Connor arrived, CJ and he were thick as thieves. They found a couple of traffic cones which, of course, they used either as faux/makeshift weapons, or as "sucker-uppers" and they busily sucked evil out of the park. There was lots of cooperative play and conversation and this went on for the entire hour - much to Annabelle's chagrin. She is not used to having to share CJ, and she would prefer to be the one directing play. So Annabelle spent part of her park time pouting, but that was her choice. (I told her I thought it was a big waste of valuable park time!) Anyway, I really think today's play session was the best hour CJ has ever had in peer play. HOORAY!

LUNCHTIME: As usual, the kids watched Spanish language programming while they ate. They are definitely used to hearing the language, and are picking up words and phrases here and there, but we need to start a more formal program. I bought the Muzzy program a couple of months back. I need to get going with that.

OPEN WIDE: Right after lunch, Annabelle and Kirby were nose to nose and Bee found herself staring down the dog's open mouth. She observed, "I don't know how food gets down your throat. It looks like your mouth just ends." I assured her that it doesn't just end - that there's a tube called an esophagus that carries the chewed food down to your stomach. Then we got out a cool quasi-book/model about the human body that we have and and I was able to show her what I was talking about.
VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP: A few weeks ago, I signed up as an educator on the Scholastic.com Web site. As a result, I was sent an email about a virtual field trip to Clearwater Marine Aquarium to visit Winter, the Atlantic Bottlenose dolphin who has a prosthetic tail. So our afternoon was all about marine mammals. First, to get them intrigued about Winter the dolphin and her tail tale, I read an excerpt from the book. Next, I shared some background info (a PDF provided by Scholastic) with the kids. We learned that we have many things in common with marine mammals (like dolphins, whales and porpoises), such as breathing air with lungs and being warm blooded. We learned that marine mammals, called cetaceans, range from less than 5 feet (Hector's dolphin) to over 100 feet (the blue whale). Together we took a true/false quiz covering our new knowledge. They aced it.

We also talked about dolphin body parts and the kids used a dolphin "map" (PDF here) to label these body parts. Before the actual video field trip started, we traveled around the house in a pod, like dolphins. ; )

Then we joined the field trip, which included a video about Winter's rescue after being trapped in ropes attached to a crab trap. The accident cost her her tail, but experts at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium were able to keep her alive, and eventually the dolphin was fitted with a series of prosthetic tails as she grew.

The field trip was informative, but honestly maybe a bit too informative, if that makes sense. Lots and lots and lots of words, and surprisingly little face time for the actual dolphin (who turns 4 on Oct. 10, by the way). So, all I can figure is maybe Scholastic wanted to leave us wanting more (translation: they want us to run out and buy the Winter's Tail book).

After the "field trip" we left the Scholastic site and hopped over to http://www.winterstail.com/. There we found photos, a singalong, games, a Winter web cam and even a video maker. "We can do video mash ups and be kid directors!" declared Annabelle.