Intense interest
With an intense interest, children are motivated to search for new information. They’ll want to look at books that offer them answers, raise more questions, and challenge them to keep looking!
With such a keen interest like dinosaurs, your child is willing and often asking for sources of information and opportunities to learn naturally
They will reach for the same book and will want to watch the same information repeatedly, as they process the information. Embrace their favourite dinosaur books and their interest, it enables you to expand on their interest, spark further curiosity, and add more books around the topic to their library.
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Dinosaur names
Does your child know the Compsognathus from the Archaeopteryx or the Memenchisaurus from the Brachiosaurus?
Bets are they are constantly surprising you with how many dinosaur names they know and can pronounce!
There are around 1000 different species of dinosaurs that we currently know of, and children will know so many more dinosaur names than adults!
199 Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals here
At 3 to 4 years old, children are learning advanced words as part of language development. For children with an interest in dinosaurs, they can recite dinosaur names from memory, and it's easier for children as they are learning new words every day
With an interest in dinosaurs, children are also learning categorisation. They can understand that within the category of dinosaurs, there are subcategories!
Why not try it out, ask your child which are their favourites and we bet they can have a great go at sorting them into categories.Meat eaters (carnivores) and plant eaters (herbivores) land or water dwellers, fast or slow, small and big, the learning possibilities are endless!
Get Dinosaur Flash to Bones Fact cards here
Make believe
At age 3 children really delve into the world of imaginative play. They suddenly become interested in mythical and magical creatures such as; fairies, unicorns, monsters but they also can become interested in dinosaurs. Ever wondered why?
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When a child reaches age 3, they start to work out and make sense of their place in the world, their sense of self is developing, so they start to try out ideas to explore this, this is where imaginative play really shines.
Through imaginative play children make a little world, they are in control of this world, it's a very powerful thing.
Photo @sensorysnail Shop wooden blocks here
Dinosaurs fit so well into this period of a child's development because they are perfect for imaginative play. The right amount of scary, interesting, large, powerful and real but...not around anymore! So children feel completely safe bringing them back to life through play.
Dinosaurs are so different and so varied, with complex interesting names, features and traits, so different to what we see today. Of course they will spark curiosity!
Remember a love of dinosaurs is a gateway into learning about our natural history, as your child gets older they will already be familiar with timelines, extinction, habitats, climates, history...it's limitless
Dream big
Dinosaurs are exciting! For us, most definitely, we loved them as a child, and the fascination never left us.
Dinosaurs! If we had never discovered the bones of one, would we have conjoured up so many different varieties of a species through imagination alone? I doubt it!
There are over 900 species of dinosaurs to date. Some are tiny like the Microraptor, some huge like the Argentinosaurus and inbetween you have terrifying, yet wildly fascinating meat eaters like the Spinosaurus that can swim as well as run on land
Photo @sensorysnail
So if you want your child to dream big, provide them opportunity to explore possibilities and believe in the impossible...hand them a dino
Shop our preloved range of dino toys here
Why? Because dinosaurs existed, yet are so unimaginably vast in capabilities and differences. So varied in ways of life, that they defy what we believe to be imaginable and go beyond it into the realms of reality. They were here, they walked this earth, and have so much to teach us
We can explore fears, challenges, knowledge, curiosity, and above all, develop a great sense of self, just from playing with a dinosaur
So if you're in dino era, about to enter it, or you love a dino! Nuture the interest, and you never know where it could lead.
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