It’s the Dutch children’s book week in the Netherlands (Kinderboekenweek). This year’s theme is “And then?”, so I will talk with the kids about the past. What did I look like as a kid and what kind of activities did we do when I was young? It would be fun to undertake some old-fashioned games with your kids. With older children you can talk about a world without mobile phones or internet. I think it’s hard to imagine for most children today.
Dinosaurs lived a really long time ago and are therefore a very suitable topic for the children’s book week. In this blog I will show dinosaur crafts the children made (including templates) and share my favourite dinosaur book & songs.
By using this template your kids can paint their own dinosaur. When the paint was dry the toddlers used crayons to draw food, trees and water for the dinosaur :-)
The remaining dinosaur (the one you cut out of the template) is also fun to use! If you attach this one to a paper with some tape and let children paint, you will get the result as shown below.
When we removed the template, we had a bonus dinosaur and wrapped it around a paper towel roll. On the left side you can see my favourite dinosaur book called The girl and the dinosaur. Read a book review on this page.
My oldest nanny kid is learning letters and I made this template for her. If you take a closer look you can see the word D I N O made from bones. She coloured the letters and loved to tell me what she read.
She used this template to colour and cut out her own dinosaur family. She even tried to mark them with numbers from large to small.
She loved to wooden dinosaur puzzle I borrowed for her. Take a look at a toy box club or your library for the possibilities. We had a little conversation about why dinosaurs don’t exist anymore, which animals survived and why dinosaurs did not. We spoke about animals whose ancestors walked or swam alongside dinosaurs like turtles, sharks and crocodiles.
Tip: a great museum in the Netherlands where kids can discover the world of nature is Naturalis. You can go exploring with the entire family in their brand-new exhibition halls filled with the best of the natural world, including their T. rex Trix!