Noticing the Happy

Our first theme week was DINOSAUR WEEK and Ava (and I) absolutely loved it.  I was lucky to be able to borrow a lot of dinosaur toys and books from a mommy friend, which helped a ton!

From my Theme Week post, here are what we did for our theme categories:

• Field Trip – We went to the Natural History Museum and got to look at a lot of dinosaur fossils and animatronic dinosaurs.

• Sensory Table – The main items I had were kinetic sand and dinosaurs. The first day, I put fossils in the sand.  Later that week, I added some branches from outside to make “trees” and put dinosaur figures in. The second week, I put some Easter eggs in there so Ava could hatch dinosaurs. I included some cups and brushes and spoons to help with the digging.

• Themed Books – We pulled several of Jane Yolen’s “How Do Dinosaurs…?” series and also had Dinosaurumpus! by Tony Mitton (which is one of my favorites). My friend also lent us a dinosaur dictionary which Ava really liked looking at.

• Themed Music – So Dan found this amazing dinosaur song by Samuel L Jackson called Tyrannosaurus Funk which is every bit as amazing as you’d think.
• Themed TV show or movie – Of course I had to show Ava The Land Before Time (on Netflix).We also checked out Dinosaur Train (on Amazon Prime).
• Art projects – The two big ones we did were Dinosaur Feet and Dinosaur Painting but we also just taped down some paper dinosaur feet on the tile and let Ava color them as she was interested. I know it won’t be appropriate for every theme, but I really liked having an ongoing project available for her.

• Food (optional) – This one I tried something and it totally bombed.  I had a feeling it might not work, but gave it a go anyway.  We picked up some pre-made cookie dough and pushed some fossils into it before we baked it… but when the dough rose in the oven, you couldn’t see the shape anymore.  My mother-in-law figured out that if you pushed the dinosaurs into the cookie right as they came out of the oven, the shape would stay, but because of the heat, kids can’t help with that. If and when I do dinosaurs again, I’ll probably try making salt dough fossils instead.

*The links to books above include affiliate links.*