For children at the Foundation Stage of their schooling, that is pupils between three and five years of age, one of the key aspects of the UK's National Curriculum at that age is the exploration of materials and their properties. A dinosaur themed sensory play area with various materials and objects within it, including dinosaur models of different shapes, colours and sizes can help young children explore objects and learn about the world around them.
Why Dinosaur Models?
Children from a young age seem to have an affinity with prehistoric animals and especially dinosaurs. Many children at this age are fascinated by these, long extinct creatures and enjoy playing with dinosaur toys. A child's natural curiosity at this age can be utilised to help them explore the properties of objects by creating an innovative play area that permits children to explore and understand different shapes and objects in a safe environment.
How to Build a Dinosaur Themed Sensory Play Area
Using a table which can be positioned in the area designated for play in the classroom or at home, take a plastic sheet or even news paper and cover the table. This protects the table from any damage that might occur, small scratches and such like. Then cover a large seed tray or box with a large plastic bag, a black bin liner is ideal and tape it down so that the box or tray is completely covered. This creates a "blank canvas" on which children can examine various dinosaur themed objects. We populated our sensory bin with some smooth pebbles and off cuts of material to provide contrasting texture. Some wooden blocks were added along with some twigs that had been gathered from the garden. Different types of dinosaur models were added, rubber ones, plastic ones, dinosaur toys of different shapes and sizes.
A Sensory Dinosaur World
The children enjoyed playing with their dinosaur world, but as they played we took time to look at the various objects and got the children to tell us how they felt, what colours could they see, was the object hard or soft? Such questions help young children from three to five years of age develop their vocabularies. By placing four chairs around the table we limited the number of children who could play and explore and this encouraged sharing of objects and creative play between the children, who were happy so share and swap their dinosaurs.
This was a very cheap resource to make, but it enabled children to explore objects, play creatively and we even had one small child sorting all the dinosaurs into the groups for us. This was a great way to introduce dinosaurs in schools in readiness for a Year 1 term topic.
Everything Dinosaur is a company run by parents, teachers and real dinosaur experts. It specialises in developing educational dinosaur toys. Many of the items featured on the Everything Dinosaur website Everything Dinosaur have been designed and tested by teachers.
Our aim is to help young people learn more about dinosaurs. With something like 900 products on line including dinosaur models, Everything Dinosaur has built up a strong reputation assisting parents, guardians and fellow teachers.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Walley
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