Night-night, Dinosaurs

Two days ago, I posted a Storybook Week post for How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Here is a picture of the result of one of those activities at our home:

Sweet, aren't they?

Investments of Books and Time

Powerlaunch has posted another tremendous reminder to help us raise our children to be leaders: Spend or Invest Your Child's Summer? I love the list of educational investments we can make for our children or help our children to make for themselves this summer. I will be going back again and again to this post because several of the ideas were refreshing and new to me.

Along a similar line, today I read Shiloah Baker's post How the Environment in the Home Affects Children. After reading both posts, I am inspired to highlight the classic books we already have in our home and to acquire more fun classics, a few books at a time.

There are easy ways to highlight certain great books. One is to move an extra bookcase into the common area of your home and to fill it with the books you want to highlight.

Another way is to pick a time of day to read aloud those particular books. Even if you already read books to your children around naptimes and bedtimes, those stories tend to be the same beloved books over and over again (at least at our house).

Breakfast is a great time for reading aloud, as is lunchtime if you are at home and your children are preschool-aged, home for the summer, home for school holidays, or home as usual for homeschooling. Many parents choose to read aloud over the dinner table, perhaps for some relaxed time after the family has finished eating. Jim Trelease in his Read-Aloud Handbook recommends reading to older children as they do the dinner dishes.

Storybook Week 8: How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?

How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, one of a series of marvelous, fantastic, wonderful books starring dinosaurs, was written by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mark Teague.

customer image from Amazon.com

1. Read Aloud

Language Arts

Read the story to your child and/or watch the storybook video.

2. Tuck in Dinosaurs

Story Interest/Pretend Play

Make a cozy box, container, or doll bed into a bed for some toy dinosaurs. Use dinosaurs you already have at home or print and cut out pictures of dinosaurs. Don't forget pillows, blankets, and teddy bears! Let your child soothe dinosaurs who are stomping, roaring, or crying. Show your child how to read a story and give hugs and kisses and tell the dinosaurs good night.

3. Dinosaur Roar!

Outdoor Activity/Dramatizing

This is a good opportunity to teach outdoor voice versus indoor voice. Tell your child dinosaurs are allowed to whisper inside the house. Practice whispering. Then say that they are allowed to roar when they are outside!

Go outside and practice roaring at the top of your lungs. Try a Velociraptor roar, then a Tyrannosaurus roar, then a Brachiosaurus roar. Do they sound different?

4. No Jumping on the Bed

Gross Motor Activity/Dramatizing

Lay a rug or mat out on the floor. Put pillows at the head. Pretend to be naughty dinosaurs jumping on the bed. Jump up and down on the mat. (If you are putting the rug or mat on a smooth floor, be sure it won't slide and cause accidents.)

When you are done being naughty dinosaurs, lay down and pretend to sleep. Older children might like to snore or learn to pretend-snore.

5. Teddy Bear Toss

Gross Motor Activity

Take a laundry or other type of basket and place it somewhere in front of a couch that your children can sit on. This game is fun with more than one person, if possible. Place a pile of teddy bears (and other stuffed animals, if you like) next to your children. Have them take turns tossing a bear into the basket. Encourage them to get the bears as close to the basket as possible, if not inside it.

Caution: If you are in the middle of teaching a baby or young toddler not to throw things in the house, you may want to adapt this activity. Place the pile of bears on the floor next to the basket and announce that it's clean-up time! The bears all want to go inside! Then take turns placing bears nicely into the basket. When you're finished, the basket can be dumped out and you can start again.

This activity is great for babies who can sit up and throw (or drop) things. It is also great for toddlers, preschoolers, and young siblings playing together.

Additional Ideas:

I just found this post on a Dinosaur Theme Week at one of my favorite blogs, Children's Learning Activities. Dig in to these ideas!

Also see my post highlighting the Dinosaur Popsicle-Stick Puzzle activity from Crafts~N~Things for Children for a great activity that is easy to do.

Guest Post at The Steady Hand: The Toddler Dress-Up Game

I don't think there can ever be enough easy, quick activities in the repertoire of toddler parents, do you? Invention, quick wits, patience, and childlikeness are all great tools for the toddler-parent toolbox. And snacks. And soft, bouncy walls and floors.

The Steady Hand has posted my Toddler Dress-Up Game today, so if you have a curious, busy toddler take a look!

Booking Through Thursday: Own or Borrow?

Booking Through Thursday hosts a weekly meme with a bookish question each Thursday.

This week's question is: "All things being equal (money, space, etc), would you rather own copies of the books you read? Or borrow them?"

Both! I do not need a copy of every book I read and probably would not return to most of them if I did own a copy. Yet I am one of those people who re-reads beloved books dozens of times.

I recently confessed to my husband that if anything happened to my copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and The Hobbit) and The Chronicles of Narnia, I would feel lost and partly empty until I replaced them.

Since this blog is about children and learning activities, I'll address the question from the standpoint of children's books. For the most part, I would prefer to own many children's books. That way, the children can see them in the bookcase and pull out whatever book they would like to explore. On the other hand, we have access to thousands of books and dozens of magazines at the public library. I would never buy all of those books or magazines, no matter how much money I had. Taking advantage of our public library means a nearly infinite stash of reading materials to choose from!

Daily Focus for a Five-Year-Old

A week ago, I posted about a process I go through each morning to help organize my tasks and my brain. I mentioned that I would be trying it with my older son for a week and reporting back.

Here is the report.

I went through the process the same way with my son that I do with myself, with one exception. I only asked him for one to two tasks in each of his categories to keep it age-appropriate.

To quickly recap, the process includes three steps: 1) writing Daily Focus on a piece of paper and listing one to three things to focus on accomplishing that day, 2) writing Daily Order underneath that and listing prioritized tasks according to prioritized life roles (like student, son, brother, worker, etc.), and 3) writing Extraordinary Thing underneath that and listing one extraordinary, amazing, over-the-top, or brave thing you will do today.

These are some examples of things my son listed under Daily Focus: playing, play-fighting, eating dinner. It turned out that he prioritized his life roles this way: Number 1 was player, number 2 was worker, number 3 was brother, and number 4 was son. I usually had to prompt him about his required chores under the worker category. His other tasks were things like giving hugs, play-fighting with his brother, and being nice. When he starts school in the fall, he will have a few more important tasks to think about in terms of getting ready for the next day and possibly homework.

When I asked what he thought about this process, he said, "Nothing!" There are parts of this exercise that are not very useful for a five-year-old or younger, but I still think getting into an organizing and planning habit is worthwhile even at this age.

One of the most useful parts of the process with him was the Extraordinary Thing. He is at an age when it is important to him to be admired for his skills. One day his Extraordinary Thing was a spin-jump, and he wanted me to watch while he did about eight spin-jumps, trying to perfect them into one perfectly amazing spin-jump. It was good for him to have that outlet.

I think it is good for people of all ages to have that outlet. Even if doing an Extraordinary Thing does not earn you anyone else's admiration, it may earn you your own approval, which always feels good.

Summer Reading Programs

In our area, there are several summer reading programs for children to earn small prizes by reading books (or having books read to them). My oldest is only five years old, so he is not eligible for Pizza Hut's Book-It! program yet, but that is always a fun one, too. My younger son is only two years old, but almost all of the programs I have seen welcome children this age who are having books read to them.

The two main things to consider when enrolling are:

1.) Will this program be fun for my child? (Or, will it kick-start some reading interest in my child if my child has none right now.) My children like books, so I want to be careful not to turn reading into a big chore for them.

2.) What are the prizes? If the prize is a shirt that only comes in large sizes, there is not much reason to sign up your toddler. If it is a bookstore voucher, you could easily use the prize on any age child.

Look for reading programs at local bookstores and grocery stores as well as your library. This morning our local library kicked off a summer reading program...and Clifford the Big Red Dog and Curious George showed up! There was a coloring page to go with the theme that both boys finished:

We are now signed up for three reading programs, which is more than enough to keep track of. It can be a good idea to sign up for more than one if you and your children will finish one of them early. For example, one of our reading programs asks for ten books that your child has read over the summer. We are still reading lots of picture books along with some chapter books, so this program will be very quickly completed.