Dinosaurs

A dinosaur topic always gets children engaged because there are so many different things to discover. This is a theme that we will definitely revisit again. The image below is a mind map I used to plan our week along with extra activities I came up with later on. I will detail each activity and add links to helpful resources.

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Dinosaur cakes – Recipe here

Robbie loves to help with baking so we always try to include it in our weeks somewhere. These were particularly fun because of the novelty shape of the dinosaur mould (from Amazon).

The cakes were really tasty, but a little difficult to get out the moulds without breaking them, but a little bit extra greasing would have done the trick.

Dinosaur Landscape picture – resources: cardboard, pens, crafting pompoms, dinosaur stickers, paint, glue.

We drew the outline of the background with a pen, then painted the sky and ground in the colours Robbie chose. Once the paint was dry we coloured in the volcanos and stuck the stickers and pompoms on, creating a nice little volcano eruption, dinosaur picture.

Dinosaur Messy play – resources: dinosaur toys, big bowls, messy play materials (I used water, oats, cheerios, and jelly.

I placed the messy play materials into separate plastic bowls and set these on a wipeable mat along with Robbie’s dinosaur toys and assorted utensils.

Robbie mostly enjoyed eating the jelly and Cheerios during this activity rather than playing with the dinosaurs in it.

Ice Dinosaur Melting – resources: silicon dinosaur mould, tray, water, paint, paint brushes.

This was a different way to explore painting and our dinosaurs. I filled our dinosaur ice cube tray with water and popped it in the freezer for a few hours. When we were ready to do the activity I pressed them out onto a tray and gave Robbie different coloured paints and brushes. He had a great time painting the frozen dinosaurs and watching them melt.

Melting Dinosaur Fossils – resources: ice cube tray, dinosaur/dinosaur skeleton toys, water, paintbrushes, Calpol syringe, sponges, big bowls.

We put dinosaur skeleton toys into ice cube trays with some water and put them in the freezer for a few hours. Then we pushed them out and experiments to see what the best way was to melt the ice and free them using different utensils.

Robbie liked to dunk them all into the warm water and try to pull the ice cubes off.

Dinosaur Fossils Salt-dough – Recipe here
resources: dinosaur skeleton toys, rolling pin, glass or butter knife (to cut out fossils).

These salt-dough crafts worked really well.

After making the salt-dough we rolled it out and pressed the skeleton toys into the dough, then used a glass or butter knife to cut around it. We put these onto a baking tray lined with baking paper and baked in the over in for about 10/15 minutes, left to cool, then painted.

Dinosaur Paint Footprints – resources: paper, dinosaur toys, paint, bowls with water.

This activity was one of those ones that sounded great in theory but actually wasn’t as successful in reality.

We dipped the feet of our dinosaur toys into the paint and stamped them onto the paper, however, the feet were too small to leave much or a shape and just left a blob of paint.

Larger dinosaur toys or less paint may have helped this.

We also had two bowls of water ready to play with and clean the dinosaurs which quickly became Robbie’s focus.

Dinosaur colouring and sticker books – resources: dinosaur colour and sticker books (Pound Shop, Wilko and Amazon)

We were very luck during lockdown (2020) to have a great variety of colouring and sticker books given to us by Robbie’s Grandad from Wilkos. We had also bought some from the Pound Shop and Amazon at the start of March guessing that they might come in handy.

Robbie likes to colour in from time to time, but would much rather run around. He loves stickers though and will sit with a sticker book for ages, so we found both sticker and colouring books a great way to spend some quiet time. Swapping from one to the other or mixing the two was great for keeping Robbie engaged.