Saturday 30 May 2015

Dinosaur Phase - Five Year Old

Tiger is absolutely crazy about these ancient creatures.
We have officially departed from Outer Space and entered the Jurassic world.
Pity the Space Toobs and Planet Toobs I just bought. *cries*
I wouldn't recommend the Planet Toobs. It's just too small. You might as well paint your own.

We already have most of the materials from our first Dinosaur Week.
Dinosaur Bin was our first sensory bin. Has it really been that long ago?

Now that Tiger is older, he is asking questions and fascinated by the facts and stats.
The idea that some of these creatures were as big as building and trees. Wow...
They lived on Earth millions of years ago? How much is a million?
How do you read this name?
 Some of them have tongue twisting names, like Pachycephalosaurus,
A month ago, he wasn't able to name any dinosaur besides T-rex.
Now?  
Iguanodon is my favorite :)

A simple setup to start some reading.
We started with these fictional ones.

By the end of first week, he was more interested in reading non-fiction.
He really enjoyed asking questions about dinos and we looked up the answers in books such as this DK Dinosaur Encyclopedia or the internet.

To supplement his learning, I printed some worksheets and 
we did some simple cutting and pasting such as this one.

This 'fill-in-the-missing-number' worksheet is from Twinkl.
We used the Montessori 100 Board for self-checking.
 
Sometimes, he ignores my plans and ideas. 
He drew lots of dinosaurs over the weeks and I suggested some stamping of names.
Nope, as usual, he stamped his ABCs :)
That's okay too. My best intentions are secondary to his ideas.
 

For some hands on activities, we tried our hands at excavating dino fossils.
Got these from Toyrus warehouse sale at about rm 3.50 each.
This was a hydrosaur. It took several days as I refused to help.
Dino week meant big words: paleontologist, excavation, fossilized, mamenchisaurus.
But it also meant patience in this case.
 

 His favorite activity has to be: Bringing them to the playground.
I hid his dinos all over the play structure and the two kids went on a dino hunt!


Caught in action!

We used our Lasy blocks to create this Brachiosaurus.
I helped, of course but he did most of the work.
After years of saying "Try again." and "You can do it, just try.", it's finally imprinted in his head.
Children need encouragement and parents who believe in them.
I try to praise intelligently or sometimes, I just do a happy dance :)
 

He was so proud of his hard work.
 

So much so, he couldn't go to bed.

We watched some dinosaur documentaries on Youtube and it inspired this
recycled Koko Krunch Dino World.
His kindy uses lots of recyclable materials for crafts, so we are trying to emulate that at home.


For our field trip, we visited Dinoscovery in KL and Tiger 
was fascinated by the differences in the footprints of herbivores and the meat eaters.
At home, we did some foot printing on our kinetic sand. 
It wasn't very obvious but still, it was good, messy fun for them.


Then, there is the Chinese...
If only there is a potion I can drink to be more competent.
For now, Pleco is my best friend.
I now know that T-rex is called ba-wang-long in Chinese.


 We are still very much in the Dinosaur phase.
It may last another month, maybe two...
As long as he wants to learn, I will support him.

My girl?
She is so into role-playing.
Despite the fact that I have said many times that this is a DINOSAUR TAIL...
"Khang gooooo"
"Hop hop hop"
Haih....ok la. You win, my little kangaroo.

Have you heard of Dinovember?
Makes me want to buy those big dinos from ELC, arrrghhh.
In the mean time, I just froze some mini ones in the fridge last night,  so it ain't over yet, folks.
Stay tuned for more dino adventures!

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