The Dinosaur House: Volume 1 (The Dinosaurs)

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High frequency or sight words are difficult for some children to learn whilst reading the first book in the Magic Tree House Series Dinosaurs Before Dark we used our Dinosaur Sight Word game to practice many of the sight words in the book. The fossil activities we did were a lot of fun so we also set up a Fossil Dig Play area for the youngest who loved being a Palaeontologist discovering the skeletons and seeing if she could match them to the actual dinosaurs on our timeline. This past weekend, his little brother rediscovered it for himself, which reminded me I’d been meaning to blog about it. I’d had a tutorial sitting in my drafts folder for a while, but still had to write down the measurements to create a template. So while I got out my measuring tape, Mr Fox had some fun resettling the dinosaurs in to their snazzy designer home. I also took the opportunity to shoot a couple more photos of the house in use – I swear it was a complete coincidence that he was wearing dinosaur pyjamas! The final step was to add duct tape around all the edges, to stop them from fraying. I’d bought some coloured duct tape for this, as I thought it would look for colourful and fun, but you could use other tape too. (I’ve actually just noticed that a piece of tape on the roof is coming off, in the most recent photos I took, so I must fix that! This dinosaur house has had a lot of love!)

First, I cut the boxes apart – I needed three pieces that were aprox. 44 x 51 cm (see below for exact measurements), and four pieces that were 23 x 46cm. I wanted to make a two-storey house with a roof garden, so I used one of the dinosaurs as a measurement of how tall each storey had to be. Adding an extra floor also makes the house sturdier.And here is what it all looks like slotted together – I hope you can figure out what goes where. Basically, the piece that there’s only one of is the middle piece, and the two pieces with the roof shape slot in either end of it. Then the four floors slide in to the remaining slots. On average the Dinosaur House gets over 40,000 visitors every year from all over the globe. Halloween is the most popular day to visit the Dinosaur House. We keep the house in the living room, as their play room is already full with plenty of other toys to play with. So when we are hanging out in the living room as a family, we can just pull it out and slot it together, and they just need to bring their box of dinosaurs through. And when they are finished playing, it easily comes apart again and takes up next to no space.

Take a ride on our Rex Express dinosaur train, where you will meet some life-size animatronic beasts, all roaring and jostling to get your attention! Classification is a big part of biology as is learning about the body. Although not our bodies dinosaur teeth are a little similar to ours for example carnivores have canines and herbivores have molar type teeth. We used this information to Sort Dinosaurs by the type of Food they ate using teeth structure.Yes, please stop and visit with Dinoman Steve if you see him out in the DinoMobile. He welcomes questions and even has a small toy if you stop to say Hi! Why not do some copy work from the book. Choose a favourite paragraph and then use this Dinosaur Themed Writing Paper from 3Dinosaurs to work on handwriting including cursive. The shaded areas are the bits you need to cut out. The slits are all aprox. 0.5cm wide. I haven’t given the exact placement of the doors and windows, they just need to be roughly within the four quadrants of each piece. The only one where you would need to measure it out exactly, is the doorway on the top half of the middle piece (the second diagram in the template), so that it aligns with the floor when you slot that in. I only drew one diagram for the first piece, which you need to cut out twice, but on one of the pieces I actually replaced the doorway on the bottom with another window, as you can see in the pictures below. Syllables are a great method to learn to help with spelling and this Dinosaur Syllable Challenge from Royal Baloo is great to do with kids to work on them breaking down words and supporting learning to spell. Currently there are 62 creatures featured in the Dinosaur House. That number grows during holidays and events.

Spelling all the dinosaur names can be “interesting” however, you can help your child to learn them first by making these Dinosaur Name Spelling Puzzles and then looking at the names of dinosaurs and deciphering their origin in Greek and Latin– it’s a great way to help children learn new vocabulary as the words are in common use now. Now comes the fun part – decorating your house! While I’d recommend leaving the cutting up to an adult, the kids can totally join in with the decorating bit. I’ve pictured all the decorated sides for you below before they were slotted together, to give you an idea of what goes where. Unless you want to do all the walls of the rooms the same colour, in which case it doesn’t matter. We decided to go for different wall paper in each room, and we used wrapping paper and craft paper for this. My son helped to chose what went in which room. If you want to follow my exact measurements, I’ve created a template for you. But if you are feeling confident, you can also just use it as a guideline to make your own, depending on how big your box/card is and who is going to live in the house. To bring a smile to people's faces, offer a place for people to escape the world for a bit and enjoy the prehistoric wild life.

Lost Kingdom

After reading in one of the Non-Fiction Dinosaurs books we have about the prehistoric seas we followed the instructions on this Prehistoric Sea Life Small World Play on 3Dinosaurs and created our own sea.