Tot School-Dinosaurs

So my initial plan was to do dinosaurs the first week my mom and aunt were up.  A few days into their visit I quickly realized that it was better to just forgo tot school and let Mara enjoy playing with them.  On that note we did fit in a few dinosaur related activities and I wanted to give them their own blog post so I can look back on the week and remember.

The first day we did some letter recognition with name dinosaurs.  I cut out crude dinosaurs out of foam and wrote Mara's first and last names on each.  I then put the corresponding letters on clothespins and let her clip the letter where they needed to go.  She did great withe the letter matching but struggled with the actual clipping of the pins.  This was good to identify this fine motor skill we need to work on.

We then created a dinosaur head by painting her feet and stamping them on a piece of construction paper.  Once the paint had dried we glued eyes and gave the dinosaur teeth.  I let Mara "color" her dinosaur too and she seemed pretty proud of her creation!

I broke out the playdough this week in a fossil dinosaur invititation to play.  I gave her some dough, dinosaurs and other fun "fossil" materials.  We talked about how you can find dinosaur bones in the rocks and read from one of our fun Usborne books!

The last activity I did with Mara this week was dinosaur eggs.  I froze the same plastic dinosaurs used with the playdough in an ice cube tray.  To make it fun I added food coloring and baking soda to each cube.  My intention was to give her a squeeze bottle with vinegar and water and let her watch the reaction as the eggs melted away.

Well we didn't have too much vinegar on hand so there wasn't much reaction.  She didn't seem to mind and enjoyed just melting the eggs with warm water.  We continued this in her bath later that night!

I had a lot of fun activities planned for dinosaur week and they just didn't happen.  At the time I was a little bummed and hard on myself for not being on top of the game.  BUT looking back on it now I'm glad we did what we did and I'm not super woman.  Tot school is always a success whether we do one activity or ten!

Next week we're on to the grocery store!  I didn't find a lot of things with this theme to do so we'll be doing a lot of pretend play and field trips to the store of course!