Harry and His Bucketful of Dinosaurs

Amanda took the lead role on last weeks activities based around the book Harry and His Bucketful of Dinosaurs. The children used toy dinosaurs to create and observe making marks with dough, printing dinosaur footprints. They had dinosaurs in the small world area to develop their imaginary play skills and their ability to play as a group. We learnt about more and less and comparing numbers as children stood on different sized dinosaur footprints, talking about how many were on each footprint and which group had more etc. At group time the children looked at pattern, matching patterened dinosaur eggs to the same dinosaur. They also learnt new mathematical language talking about dinosaurs and comparing those that were tall, short, and long. We continued our mathematical learning putting dinosaur bones in size order talking about long and short. Children learnt about observing changes over time, watching dinosaurs, frozen in ice, slowly defrost. They developed their physical skills digging to find hidden dinosaur bones in the sand. They looked at patterns and creative development using toy dinosaurs and dipping their feet in paint, making prints on paper. We took full advantage of the good weather and took all our learning opportunities outdoors, the children read their Harry stories outside and we added the dinosuars to soil and shells and other natural resources. The children also had the opportunity to take dinosaurs out into the Park environment and really explore nature. There were lots of observations took place.