Friday 13 July 2012

Readathon 2012 - Week 4 Imagination!


This week's theme for the Readathon is Imagination. We are NEVER in short supply of that here.  I looked at the various games and activities provided MemeTales and while they looked good to me, we didn't do a single one.   Once we read the book "There's a Dinosaur in the Park." by Rodeny Martin and John Siouw about 50 million times C decided to look for dinosaurs in our house, at the beach, on the road, and in his room.

My little guy has a very active imagination. It's more active than his sister's was at the same age. He regularly pretends he is Peter Pan, or a tiger, or a train. In fact last weekend at the beach he was a train chugging around in circles in the water!  He creates elaborate games where he flies in to rescue Wendy and then they go away in his big big truck and eat clouds with dinosaurs. I attribute this imagination to not only his personality but the fact the we read constantly(and actually I think the TV we do watch promotes his imagination too).

In order to promote imagination, we talk constantly about EVERYTHING, and I play his games even it means I get a tiger eating me in bed at 6am.  After all, don't you remember being imaginative as a kid and creating whole worlds in your mind? Wasn't it great? I think we need imagination in this world of fast paced technology that removes imagination from us by instant gratification.

Of course if you do need an activity to do here is one that is easy to work with and includes the dinosaur theme.

Get yourself some felt dinosaur shapes either by making you own or buying them, and then decorate the dinosaur shapes with felt scraps.  This is a picture of what I came up with:

Our dinosaurs have eaten rocks, had parties, been taken on truck rides, and told stories.  They have even been counted and group by colors, or features such as stripes or dots.  We sang the song 10 little dinosaurs, and if I choose to, these same dinosaurs could act out the book that we read for this week with some added characters if C so desires.

Being a stickerosaurus - why not?
Allow your child to be imaginative and have fun!

2 comments:

  1. Those dinos are SUPER cute! I love felt and these might just get added to my to do list! And so great that he has such an active imagination!

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    1. The dinos were super easy to make all you need it the felt, a template off the net, and some good tacky glue. My 8 yr old was able to trace, cut, and glue most of them with us while I kept the 2.5 yr old out of the way since his idea of help wasn't actually working!
      We do love his imagination. It usually keeps us guessing as to what will come out of his mouth next!

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