Isn’t he gorgeous?
He’s actually rated for 6+ but it made a fantastic collaborative activity for the three girls when Daddy went back to work! He started as two pieces of plywood with shapes cut out and a sheet of paper with maps and numbers. The big girl found all sorts of numbers and noticed a pattern – did you know that 25, 26, 27 and 28 are the same order as counting 5, 6, 7, 8 but they all have a 2 in front? She was very quick finding the pieces on the wood from the map too. They were well punched and easy for both girls to be able to push out and we took turns putting them together. Then they decided they wanted to paint the pieces and I took the opportunity to put a few spots of glue in and make it a bit more stable.
As well as all that maths and fine motor skills, it was good to have an opportunity to just sit together and talk. The big girl has done a bit on dinosaurs before so she was chatting away about them. She also knows a little bit about skeletons and was asking about bones so we all felt each other’s necks and compared them to the dinosaur. They both had a ball.
A great little activity to do together, they were very proud of their dinosaur and excited about their special ‘Girl Time’. This post is for the We Play linkup at Childhood 101, check out the other great play ideas there.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
That would be great fun.
The Melbourne Museum had cards you could post that were able to be punched out and build animals in a similar way. I got a couple for my girls and they had a great time, although the card didn’t stand up to Heidi wanting to play with it.
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We have one of these! Just fantastic. Junior Hoges put it together last school holidays and painted it rainbow colours. He still has it up on his shelf in his bedroom.
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Aspie teen had some of these, he loved it
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Awesome blog! So happy I happened to find it thru the We Play Link Ups.
Very cool dinosaur, too.
My sons love hands on science…we do quite a bit of it at our home, too.
Thanks for sharing this neat project…bet they had a blast.
Have subscribed thru Google Reader…will look forward to reading your other posts daily.
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Have a great week!
Colleen
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Wow. He’s really cool. I don’t have kids at home any longer, but when I did, our projects didn’t turn out so well. Our dinosaur would have lost a leg to a dachshund in the first 5 minutes!
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This looks like a project my nephew would take on. He is all about dinosaurs. I believe he has several of these puzzle sets. Now he has graduated to tracing the bones and makes his own puzzle sets. Thanks for the post. I’m going to share it with my nephew.
That would be very cool making your own!
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My son would love this being into dinosaurs and puzzles.
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They say from 6+ and she wouldn’t have been able to do it on her own, but it worked really well doing it together.
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These are so fun to put together!
I’ve had this page open for nealr 36 hours waiting for me to get back to it and comment. You know … my comment really isn’t worth that build up!
Anyway, what I had wanted to say is, my husband used to work with a man who had an acquired brain injury from when he was 7, so mentally he was still at that age, and he LOVED dinosaurs. My husband was in charge of hist Christmas present one year and bought him a kit that lets you chip out dinosaur bones from a clay type material (tools and goggles included), and then you get to construct your dinosaur from the plastic bones.
Dadda loved this kit so much that he bought one for Princess and they did it together one afternoon and had a great time. Unfortunately he doesn’t stay together very well, and he is currently sitting on our cd shelf in pieces
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We have a similar plywood puzzle that forms a bumble bee – got it as a freebie with a magazine order – and I’ve been waiting for B to be a little older to put it together – I love the painting though, I’ll have to hold on to that idea!
Ooh, I have seen these to buy before but never seen a completed one, what a great resource and it sounds like you all had lots of collaborative fun putting it together.
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