Laura Numeroff has a good thing going. And it keeps going, around and around as her circular stories charm children every time. As part of her series that began with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Numeroff explores the cause and effect cycle from the obvious to the outlandish as a pancake leads to syrup, then eventually tap shoes and even a tree houses! All coming full circle as the pig is led to ask for another pancake!
As you read this book with children, pause before some of the pig’s requests to see if the children can anticipate what will come next. After reading, you might even pose some hypothetical questions, like, “What if you gave the pig a blanket? What might she ask for next?” Remember that there isn’t a right answer. You might think the logical request would be a pillow, but a child may connect the blanket with something entirely different. Just as a pancake eventually leads to a tree house, your children will have reasons for their connections, so let them explain! This kind of discussion reinforces the concept of cause and effect, while also allowing for creative thinking.
A unit on dinosaurs hardly seems complete without talking a bit about fossils! The common way of using plaster of Paris to make hardened imprints seemed a bit daunting to me, particularly when I read through the warning label, not to mention the mixing, the mess, and a number of excited preschoolers involved in the process. For our dinosaur unit we made fossil imprints using baking soda clay. I simply made the clay the night before and left it in a sealed Ziplock bag. After reading our dinosaur book and talking about fossils in small group, each child was given a paper plate and a small ball of soda clay to flatten. Then they could choose from plastic dinosaurs to make footprints and/or large seashells to press in for a texture print. I also included a note explaining to parents that the clay needed to air dry at least overnight to harden to it’s “fossilized” state. (Hopefully, you can see the imprint in the picture above. If I had been thinking more about photography than preschool, I would have gone for a little more color interest here!)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Music is the universal language of mankind.” It is a transcendent medium, one that takes on a variety of forms to meet the intrinsic needs of each person. It is enlivening and motivating. This we can all agree on. What has been debated in recent decades is the relationship of music to learning. Early studies presented the concept of the “Mozart Effect”, claiming that simply listening to Mozart made people (particularly applied to children) smarter. The study had shown enhanced performance on certain measures after a period of listening to Mozart. What followed was a firestorm of (good-intentioned as well as money-motivated) promoters of the idea that listening to music would make children smarter. Many began to believe that simply playing great musical works in the presence of infants and young children would boost their IQs and give them the fighting edge in the race to becoming the uber-brilliant brain child apparently desired the world over. 
