We had a roarin' good time this week doing several different dinosaur activities. Check out the links below to revisit similar themes, or keep scrolling to see what we did this week:
Books
We found a lot of dinosaur books at the library this week! Sweet E's favorite was "Old MacDino Had a Farm" and we read it countless times throughout the week. Even Little M&M and Honey Pot would come running into the room when they heard me singing it. And the other favorite of the week was "Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs" which is the only book here from our own collection. I often found Sweet E sitting on the couch "reading" this one to herself. So cute!
Letter D - Dinosaur Stickers
I have tons of stickers leftover from Honey Pot and Little M&M's younger days. For this week's letter recognition activity, I offered these shiny stickers for Sweet E to place onto a big letter D that I cut out for her.
She loved these!
And it was great fine motor work.
Find the Letter D - Dinosaur Stickers
Next I brought out another sheet of dinosaur stickers that I found, and invited Sweet E to place them on top of all the letter D's she could find.
This was the first real alphabet activity we have done, combining letters, and she was eager to try!
Together, we found all of the D's!
Playdough and Dinosaurs
We pulled out our dough and cut out some dinosaur shapes!
We decorated them with beads and googly eyes.
Then we brought out our large dinosaur toy and made footprints!
One of Sweet E's favorite shows is Mother Goose Club. We opened her Mother Goose Club book and found the dinosaur song so we could sing it while we stomped through the playdough!
Lego Duplo Painting
This idea and the printables come from Stay at Home Educator. I wanted to find a way to change up our painting crafts, so this seemed like a fun way to do that. I let Sweet E choose three colors of paint, and we pressed some Lego Duplos into them.
After I showed her how to stamp them onto the paper, she happily gave it a try!
So fun!
Here they are dried and cut out!
Later, she had the idea to stick her dinosaur toy into the paint all by herself. So I gave her a coloring page with a similar dinosaur on it. She loved stomping it around on her paper!
Dinosaur Ice Excavation
I have done this activity with Honey Pot and Little M&M before, though we used to have more dinosaur toys to use than this. LOL. I provided Sweet E with the frozen dinosaurs, a couple tools, a dropper, and a bowl of warm water.
Then she started squirting the water onto the ice blocks to try to free the dinosaurs!
Once they were a little more visible she tried using the tools too.
It was a fairly cool day, so the ice wasn't melting very quickly. But she was very patient, and played like this for a while! I refilled the bowl of warm water as needed.
Later, Little M&M joined her, which sped up the process!
She loved picking up the chipped off pieces of ice!
Once all the dinosaurs were free, Little M&M brought a cube of ice onto the trampoline and made up a new game called Bouncy Ice. He and Sweet E played this for a long time until dinner! We replaced the ice cube once in a while. And Honey Pot came out to play too. It's actually a new favorite trampoline game LOL.
Dinosaur Bones in Sand
I hadn't planned this activity, but we had some free time one afternoon so I threw it together for her! We only had kinetic sand on hand, so I took a few dinosaur bones from a puzzle toy and pressed the sand on top of it.
She brushed the sand away to reveal the dinosaur bones buried within it.
Then she started playing with the kinetic sand. She hadn't really done this yet, so it was a fun new sensory material for her. She molded it.
And carved a face into it!
And made handprints in it!
Dinosaur Stomp - Gross Motor Game
As our last activity of the week, I drew some shapes onto the driveway. I would ask her to "Stomp like a dinosaur to the heart" and other shapes.
But Little M&M was also outside with us, and he extended the activity into a dinosaur obstacle course! Here he wrote "Ready, Set, Go!" and the first part of the course was to "stomp" across the shapes I had made.
Then he wrote "spin" and a squiggly line, and "run" followed by another line.
"Pretend to be a dinosaur" and then "jump" came next.
And finally, "Shout and roar like a dinosaur" was at the end. He and Sweet E did his obstacle course several times together. Love how he contributes to our themes each week!
We are going to take a break from our letter-of-the-week themes, and do BEACH activities next week as we prepare for our upcoming vacation. Stay tuned!
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