Dinosaur Small World Play

Our local sells-everything-under-the-sun shop had a box of toy dinosaurs when we visited it earlier in the week; Poppet spent a long time rifling through it, comparing dinosaurs, trying to find a 'nice' one. She eventually settled on a quite friendly-looking brachiosaurus (they have their names helpfully printed on the underside). He still had a bit of a fearsome toothy grin so she obviously felt she had to confirm with me - "izzat a nice one?", before she was satisfied enough to take him home. We were en route to the library so picked up a dinosaur book while we were there, and thus a dinosaur enthusiast was born.

At home, we made a dinosaur small world play scene using a large garden sieve. We filled it with sunflower seeds and split peas, and then used greenery from the garden stuck into lumps of playdough to create trees and bushes.

It smelled really good! The playdough was eucalyptus scented and the foliage included rosemary and sage. I also discovered some mini dinosaurs in our job lot of plastic animals we got from eBay, so these became 'baby' dinosaurs.

We attempted to match the dinosaurs up to the pictures in the book.....

Later on I discovered that what I thought was a dinosaur was actually a kangaroo, felt a bit stupid. Should have noticed the ears......

We have had a couple more dinosaur books out now and they have really highlighted my terrible dinosaur-related knowledge! For instance, did you know that not all dinosaurs were wiped out?! Some survived and evolved into birds! Blew my mind! Poppet mainly likes going through the books and labelling all the dinosaurs as "good" or "bad". Most are bad.

I hope this dinosaur interest continues as I would love to watch The Land Before Time again!