We picked up a book on dinosaurs from the library a week or so ago.
I wouldn't qualify it as a
great book, but it had some good information about dinos woven into its slightly awkward story, and it was good enough to elicit 20 or requests for it to be read by our little man. Since I've been wanting to revamp our sensory bin for a while, so I used it as a launching point for a new set-up.
I cleaned out the rice and lentils that have been living with some small dump trucks and bulldozers in our under the bed storage box for the past year or so. (I saved the rice/lentil mix in some ziplocks to be used later) and the box was now usable for a dinosaur habitat.
I dumped a bit of sand from our sand-box in with our dinos and then collected a bunch of other stuff for Jonathan to add or not as part of his play:
I mixed up some mud-playdough by using this
recipe and adding some instant coffee to the water for color. (I think next time I would use food color since the coffee gave it sort of a funky, musty smell). I put out a tub of way out of date couscous that has been haunting the back shelves of our pantry, some leaves, some pine cones, a cut-up egg carton, and an easter egg with a small lizard inside (to hatch as a baby dino).
When he woke up from his nap, I read the dinosaur book to him again and then told him that I had a special project for him to build a habitat for the dinosaurs to live. He was excited to have new things in the bin and spent a long time using the play-dough and sand alone and then gradually incorporated each of the other elements. When he was done he was so proud of it that he would show it to anyone who came over and refused to move the elements around more- he just wanted to talk about what the dinos were doing and eating and how the t-rex
looked scary, but was
actually friendly.
