Review: Dinosaur Countdown

Dinosaur Countdown by Nicholas Oldland

My Rating: 3 out of 5 Smiling Deinonychus

Recommends for readers of 1-2-3 Dinosaurs Bite! A Prehistoric Counting Book by the American Museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs! by Gail Gibbons and Inside-Outside Dinosaurs by Roxie Munro.

Summary: Count to ten with lots of happy dinosaurs.

Review: The best parts of Dinosaur Countdown are the numerous smiling dinosaurs. Most of the books you find on the shelf about dinosaurs are realistic to the point of being a little bit scary. The other extreme is having dinosaurs that look nothing like any fossils ever found. I'll never forget when I shared a magnet board tale of ten dinosaurs in storytime and a little enthusiast shouted, "Those aren't REAL!!!"

Children can learn to count to ten with realistic, friendly dinosaurs. My favorite part of the book is the 0/none page where fossils are shown. I would have rated this book higher if the pronunciations were included on the page. They are included in the back (on my Kindle version), but it's difficult to flip back and forth. My storytime anecdote should serve as a warning, you definitely want to pronounce everything correctly!

Sensitive Readers Beware: No objectionable material.

D is for Daredevil

The usual suspects:

Sorting capital/lowercase magnets

Practice letter shape with Crayola monster flashcards

Color weekly superhero

Leapfrog flashcard D (for drum)

Play dough

Letter worksheets from Raising Rockstars

Honestly, I couldn't find much for Daredevil, so I also looked for Dash sheets from the Incredibles. There wasn't anything out there that I could find. Note to all you tech savvy mama's: Please make an Incredibles Preschool Pack! Instead, I chose to use the materials we already had on hand. We've used the DC sticker books in the past, but I found this Dinosaur sticker book to use this week. Bobo worked on the parts of T-Rex and the life cycle of a dinosaur.

We made dinosaurs out of Play-Doh and letter Ds.

We have a large collection of coloring and activity books, so I pulled out the How to Train Your Dragon one. The riddle activity was Bobo's favorite. 

We attempted to watch the Daredevil movie with Jennifer Garner (I just started watching Alias on Netflix!!!), but we couldn't get through it. We didn't even make it to Elektra's appearance.

Our favorite video of the week is "Dee Doodley Do" from the StoryBots.

Shared with TGIF.

Book Review: Dinosaur VS. The Potty by Bob Shea

I don't necessarily review new books coming out, but I had to review a Dinosaur VS. book since The Potty just came out as a board book. Yay for durability! Yay for books that can go in the bathroom without fear of retribution from the librarian! Yay for Dinosaur!

"Dinosaur is a little red dinosaur who might remind you of a toddler you know," said Bob Shea, author of the Dinosaur books. In Dinosaur VS. The Potty, Dinosaur drinks lots of lemonade without using the potty. Dinosaur wins! Then, Dinosaur plays in the sprinklers without using the potty. Dinosaur wins! As we all know, Dinosaur can't defeat the potty forever. Read the book to find out what finally gets Dinosaur into the bathroom.

Shea's picture books have large illustrations with sparse, hilarious text. They are perfect to read with a large group of toddlers, after encouraging them to roar like a dinosaur of course. The board book version is wonderful for little hands to view "by myself." Best of all, Dinosaur faces some of the same situations as toddlers such as bedtime and the library.

As a delightful surprise while researching Bob Shea for this review, I discovered his fabulous sense of humor.

Here's a photo of a bear I fought this one time. I totally won. Yeah, I know, I'm pretty brave. --Bob Shea