Preschool Dinosaur Discovery Table - Encouraging Exploration & Discovery of New Ideas

http://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/preschool-dinosaur-discovery-table/
I am going to be starting a new series called Preschool Discovery Tables. This is in huge part to helping my son with his independent play skills (not many here). I have already made one featuring music and it has been a huge hit and still remains in tact upstairs in the playroom. I think it will be a permanent fixture for now! Most will come and go and stay as long as there is interest, but the purpose is to spark some creative/pretend play without needing me to constantly facilitate the play.I have made discovery tables before, but they often contained to many activities (although nicely presented on shelves) that needed more direction then he could handle on his own. I will save these activities for our table time together instead. I believe that if the table is "workable" for him it will be easier for us to encourage him to play alone without feeling like we really should be there. It will also provide him with a sense of success at being able to manipulate things on his own and hopefully be enjoying enough to  try again! In addition these discovery tables do provide a sense of novelty since for the most part they won't be up for all that long but at least a week or two!

Hands On Preschool Dinosaur Play & Learning

Here's our dinosaur themed discovery table to go with our current unit on what else, dinosaurs! I always like to include sensory play, so I have homemade play dough for making fossils or whatever and a craft sand filled with bin with dinosaur bones for excavation. I included lots of dinosaurs for pretend play, books for learning about dinosaurs and a tray with dinosaur magnets to play look at and compare!

  These are all easy and open-ended activities for him to explore and discover. I tried to include lots of opportunities for independent play or at least play that didn't need my full support to enjoy! He enjoyed brushing off the bones and sifting through the sand to find all the bones. He pushed the dinosaurs into the clay (I showed him how to ball the dough around them and make "eggs") and he also made a play dough cave! We love books so he looked through them all quite a few times and we read them together. Pretend play is a bit tougher for him but he liked the dinosaur tree house I found at a second-hand store and made the dinosaurs climb around a bit!

Dinosaur Play Hatch, Match

Dinosaur Play Hatch, Match & More - Hands On Preschool Dinosaur Play

http://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/dinosaur-hatch-match-more/

First off, I just love the title. All I could think of was some sort of hatch and match activity. I wanted it to be colorful, multi-dimensional, sensorial and instructional. Around here, I need the most bang for the buck, so to speak. I put this together quickly after searching for a good print out that went along with my Dinosaur Toob. Apparently it is not uncommon to have easter greass and plastic eggs readily accessible 6 months after Easter around here! It took a little searching to find some worksheets that had enough of the same dinosaurs so that there was a little challenge but also had some good information about each one but not to much. I found these over at The Adventures of Bear.

I also printed out a dinosaur unit from Over the Big Moon just in case I needed some more things to do. Usually worksheets don't go over so well here, but he seemed unusaually interested in working on some of them. He did sit with me while I printed them off the computer so maybe that helped. While I worked on my compute, he sat next to me and worked nicely with some different activities. Sometimes he needed me and other times, he did a great job independently. While I was setting up the dinosaur hatch he put a number puzzle in order and worked on matching some three part Montessori Dinosaur cards. He even did a great job trying to match the names.

For our grand hatch and match dinosaur play activity, I cut the sheets of dinosaur facts that I printed out from The Adventures of Bear and I rolled them up into eggs. Originally, I had wanted to put the dinosaurs in the eggs, but my eggs were too small. I used a crate to make a nest out of paper Easter grass and then I burried everything. I placed a dark colored scrap booking sheet next to the crate so that the strips of paper would have a mat to be placed on and be more visible than on the white table surface. (I often use scrap book paper as work surfaces.)First, he opened all the eggs and I showed him how to lay out each strip from top to bottom. Then he went about digging or "excavating" through the shreds for dinosaurs to match using his fine motor skills to open and close the eggs!

Some dinosaurs were easier to match than others since the pictures were not exact duplicates, so I showed him how we could match the features that we see the picture and the dinosaur have in common. He did a great job and is really learning his dinosaurs! He went pretty quickly and got some tough ones right on the first try! We talked about the dinosaurs based on the facts provided. I am definitely not a dinosaur expert! We also use some printed cards of dinosaur body parts and used our large dinosaurs to find the parts like horns, claws, teeth, scales, and tails. Later on he had fun filling the eggs with the dinosaurs that could fit or some of the grass.

I love watching his skills improve. 

Dinosaur Activity Trays

Dinosaur Activity Trays

http://lifewithmoorebabies.blogspot.com.es/2013/08/dinosaur-activity-trays.html

I always like to have a few simple Montessori style activity trays ready to fit our theme work. Usually, if I set him up next to me, he will work somewhat independently on them while I get some computer time. It feels like forever but we are finally wrapping up dinosaur week. We have had some great fun with all sorts of sensory play, measuring lessons, field trips and more. Sometimes though, we need to work on sitting and completing tasks from start to finish and that's where my activity trays come into play!

I really like for the trays to be as hands-on as possible for sit down activities so that they are still engaging and exciting but still need concentration and control. He loves to see clothes pins, pom poms and dice! Besides the traditional alphabet and number recognition, I like to find ways to include addition, matching, fine motor skills and crafts. The latter two being his least favorite! Most of our trays usually cover 2-3 skills! I do use some worksheets I like but they don't usually incorporate many skills into one sheet. Here are 4 activity trays and you can definitely alter them in easy ways to fit the current age or ability of your child!

1. Pom Pom Dinosaur Outline & Counting: All of these activities really come from these two sets of dinosaurs I drew and cut out from card stock. For this one, I punched holes all around the outside and simple placed a bowl of small pom poms next to it with chopsticks. Each punched hole was to have a pom pom placed on top. Hopefully, he would use the chopsticks but he was easily frustrated with them. He counted how many were left each time!

   2.

Dinosaur torn paper and gluing craft. First Liam had to practice tearing the paper into small pieces. Then he squeezed glue and went to town decorating his dinosaur. Simple but fun!

   

3. Roll and count dinosaur game. This has multiple steps but can be simplified for a younger child or made more difficult for an older child! Liam rolled the dice and placed one by each dinosaur. He picked out the correct number magnet and then put "spikes" on his dinosaur with the clothespins. Lastly he counted the spikes and chose the number equal to the amount he counted. Lots of counting, number recognition and pre-math skills. Oh and some fine motor work thrown in too!

4. Alphabet dinosaur magnet match. Similar set up to the count game above except with letter magnets. Liam chose a letter from the bin and placed it on the correct tray and used a clothes pin to mark the correct match on the dinosaur. Sadly the pictures showing him doing this had some problems but he did put all the magnet letters in order after!

My name is Sarah and I am a fitness professional turned stay at home mom to my almost four-year old son Liam. He is on the spectrum and has sensory processing disorders so we work extra hard each week to come up with fun activities where we can learn through play and enjoy being together! Some days are winners and some days are more of a challenge. I hope you enjoy our dinosaur fun that we have been having around here and stop by and visit us at Little Bins for Little Hands (click here) or like us on Facebook at Little Bins for Little Hands (click here). We have lots of ideas for sensory play and more! 

Preschool Dinosaur Footprint Activities

Preschool Dinosaur Footprint Activities from: littlebinsforlittlehands.com

http://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/simple-fun-dinosaur-footprint-activities/

Hands On Dinosaur Play

Our dinosaur unit has finally come to a close with a trip to see real life dinosaur footprints up close right in our area. Holyoke, MA is home to a huge slab of rock down by the river with probably a dozen footprints thought to be of a two-legged, carnivorous dinosaur. How  cool is that? I planned a few dinosaur footprint activities leading up to our visit to the foot prints, but lets start with the great photos of our field trip first!

(I did not use chalk but helpful for Liam to see exactly where they were!)

My favorite.

Here are the dinosaur footprint activities that we did this week for footprints

Dinosaur Footprint Activities #1:

• Painting footprints and making dinosaur tracks. Liam said he wanted to use his watercolors, so I simple drew a pattern for a footprint over an dover onto paper and I also traced his feet just for fun! He enjoyed painting the footprints and we even got into some color mixing discussions with the watercolors!

 Dinosaur Footprint Activities #2:

• Dinosaur footprint  ABC & 123 game. Help the dinosaur across the lava (floor)! This game was awesome for letter and number recognition, locating them and placing them in the correct order while helping his favorite dinosaur across the floor, oh I mean lava! I simply cut out 26 footprints and put letters on one side and numbers on the other. We spread them out on one side of the room in rows (out-of-order) and he worked at placing them in alphabetical order and moving his dinosaur from print to print. Of course, it included some gross motor play. Flip the footprints over and you have another game with numbers!

 Dinosaur Footprint Activities #3:

• Here is a life size Triceratops footprint that we measured and filled with hand prints. I saw this on google images when I was poking around. The printout is from Schleic products   (Click here). Very big and quite a few sheets to print but black/white, fast print works fine! I thought it would be neat to cut out handprints and see how many would it take to fit inside the footprint. We actually did this after visiting the tracks, so it was neat that he actually got to put his hand inside a real one! It took 40 of his handprints to fill it. He counted! This is certainly my favorite of the dinosaur footprint activities!

Dinosaur bubble bath sensory play. Ok, so it isn't a footprint activity exactly. These poor dinosaurs feet were dirty! They have hung out in moon sand and have been painted on and played with frequently. Might as well fill up the water table with warm, soapy, sudsy water, add a sponge and clean em up!

We have done so many wonderful dinosaur footprint activities!