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!

Green Day (not the band)

Following on from the success of our yellow day I thought a day of green things would be easy but it was a bit of a wash out..........

We started off shopping at the greengrocers and I gave Poppet a free reign of the shopping basket as long as the things she chose were green - she excelled at this task and chose apples, cucumber, mangetout and a green packet of crisps. At home she helped make lunch and was astounded to find the big green watermelon we had was red inside. 

After lunch I set up a small world underwater play scene in a plastic under-bed storage box using green glass beads, green milk carton lids, shells and a couple of boats. To this I added green ice-cubes in the shape of fish. Unfortunately I completely over-estimated how long these would take to melt and they were gone in a couple of minutes before I had a chance to take a photo. Poppet spent the rest of the afternoon asking "where fish gone?" over and over and over. So at least she learnt an important lesson in the properties of ice and it's tendency to melt.

Once she got over the sudden unexplainable disappearance of the fish she spent a while filling the boat up with beads (she loves these glass beads) and emptying it and filling it again. This was the first time she had played with a play scene like this and it really captured her attention.

To round our green day off, we sat down to watch Shrek (what?, that totally counts as a green activity).

Poppet: 2yrs 5mos

Little: 9mos

Safari Sand Play

We have just received a little bag of play animals in the post via Ebay and put them to use straightaway, creating this safari small world play scene in the quite frankly under-used sand pit. I was quite surprised at Poppet's animal knowledge, she could name most of them. All the hours spent reading 'Dear Zoo', 'Animal Alphabet' etc... have obviously paid off.

I buried a plastic box filled with water under the sand to create a 'watering hole', stuck some greenery and flowers in and added a couple of rocks to create the scene. Together we picked out the safari type animals. She took a lot of convincing that the cow was not appropriate.

Notice how Poppet is attempting to have as little of her feet as possible in contact with the sand. The little weirdo.

She wanted lifted out and preferred to play with the animals from outside the sandpit. Predictably, most of the animals ended up dying a watery death at the bottom of the watering hole.

Yes, she got her own way with the cow. Some arguments just aren't worth it

Then there was a lot of 'raining'. Somehow it always ends up as water play!

Poppet: 2yrs 4 mos

Little: 7 mos