Welcome to the start of a wonderful new series: Play, Craft and Learn with Dinosaurs! Each day for five days a group of amazing bloggers will be featuring a different theme: learning, fine motor, gross motor, arts and crafts, and food! To start the series, here are some ideas for Learning with Dinosaurs.
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I have to confess that other than knowing the names of three or four dinosaurs, I really didn’t know much about them. So this was a great learning experience for me *and* my son.
Dinosaur Books
My first place to look for an introduction to dinosaurs was books. Here are some recommendations:
Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs by Byron Barton
We’re a huge fan of all Barton’s transport books, so it was good to see a different theme. Bright, simple bold images draw the reader in. Only eight dinos are featured but pronunciations are included!
There are really amazing pictures in this book, it is hard to believe that they’re not photos of live dinosaurs!
Although this doesn’t teach readers much about dinosaurs, as only one is featured, it is a great link into the world of dinosaurs for a train-loving child like my son!
This book has cute graphics and quirky humour – another great addition to our Boynton collection!
These early reader books are a great set of printable books that feature boy-favoured themes. I printed and compiled the dinosaur book, which is a cute version of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear”. We’ve read other books from this set, so it was great to try this one too.
For more book ideas, check out 23 Dinosaur Picture Books from No Time for Flashcards
Dinosaur Train and alphabet cards
As mentioned above, my son is a huge train fan, so we checked out the TV series “Dinosaur Train”. We both particularly liked the “Dinosaurs A-Z” song, and the PBS website helpfully has the lyrics (with pronunciations!) and A-Z cards to go along with it! The song is SO much fun and I love hearing F try to sing it. I printed out the A-Z cards and used them as a dino version of our Alphabet Train activity; placing the cards around the track and F collecting them in alphabetical order.
Dinosaur Counting and Numeral Identification Game
I came across this cute dinosaur counting game from Lessons Learn Journal and printed out the free game cards. The aim is to match up the baby dinosaurs with the mother dinosaur. He did pretty well at matching up cards 1 – 5, then needed some help matching the rest. He can recite his numbers well but he needs to work on actual counting.
These books and games were a great introduction to dinosaurs for both of us and a great start to the Play Craft and Learn with Dinosaurs series. Look out for more dinosaur posts over the next few days!
