What’s with kids and dinosaurs?

Every week or two at nursery school, we present a new theme for the children.

Our crafts, circle time, stories, music and science all revolve around this theme, so the children are learning about a concept, season or idea while they are playing. For example, if our theme is apples, we may do apple printing for our craft, learn some apple finger plays and songs, read about how apples grow and eat apple sauce for snack. For a field trip, we may go and pick apples at a local orchard.

During the course of a year, the children are exposed to a variety of themes, from Chinese New Year and winter to pets and teddy bears.

By far, one of our favourite themes every year is DINOSAURS.

Preschoolers have a fascination with these prehistoric creatures and never tire of hearing and talking about them.

There are so many interesting facts to know about dinosaurs. First of all, we learn they are extinct. All gone. We talk about different theories of how they might have met their demise. Was it an ice age or a giant crater that hit the earth? We talk about the millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the world. We ponder the question of how we know dinosaurs existed if there were no people around? We learn about bones, fossils and skeletons. There might even be a few bones in the sandbox for our future paleontologists to dig.

What kids really love is to think about how gigantic some of the dinosaurs were. As big as your house, or bigger than your car, longer than our nursery school and taller than your chimney! And the more ferocious the dinosaur, the better. A tyrannosaurus rex has much larger appeal than the slow stegosaurus. The meat-eaters seem to make a much stronger impression than the gentle, boring plant eaters. Just look at those teeth. Give the children a bucket of miniature plastic dinosaurs and they go for the T-Rexs right away, pretending they are attacking each other mercilessly.

They love learning details about dinosaur life, with the security of knowing there are no dinosaurs in the world today.

Barney is one of the preschoolers’ favourite purple dinosaurs, and a kinder T-Rex cannot be found, on stage or off.

Kids love to pronounce the names of the different dinosaurs: iguanodon, bracheosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops, ankylosaurus, dimetrodon, pterodactyl....

They were big, they were fierce, they had long names, they had spikes, horns, plates, and claws - all the elements a preschooler needs to stimulate his imagination. Some could swim, some could fly and some could run faster than your car. What superheroes! And imagine, these monsters actually hatched out of eggs!

For crafts, we might paint a prehistoric mural for the wall or create toilet paper roll dinosaurs. At circle time, we may have a game of dinosaur dominoes or play a dinosaur memory game. We may tell dinosaur riddles or do a dinosaur quiz. At story time, we have plenty of library books available about dinosaurs, both stories and factual. We sing a few dinosaur songs, play with dinosaur puppets and dance the dinosaur stomp. There is no end to the activity for preschoolers when it comes to dinosaurs.

If you are ever looking for a fun and educational excursion for the whole family, visit the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax. There you will find plenty of displays on dinosaurs, skeletons and fossils. And, don’t forget to say hello to Gus, the 84 year old tortoise. After all, he just may be a descendant of one of those dinosaurs.

Lila Hope-Simpson is the Director of the Home & Heart Child Development Centre and Family Day Care Agency in Wolfville

www.homeandheart.org