One of my current charges favourite things at the moment is Dinosaurs! If you need to know anything about dinosaurs such as Who eats meat?, Who eats plants?, How did dinosaurs die?, Which dinosaur is the biggest? Etc etc then J is the little man to ask ( warning he will become a friend for life if you ask too many questions though!)
There's only so much dinosaurs stomping roaring and hatching from an egg I can take, So I needed to find something which would not only keep J interested but was also going to let his twins sister M and I move away and do something different.
M and J have started school this year so time for arts and crafts and other such activities has become limited, that's when I decided we would do something which could be done in stages.
Paper mâché is one of my pet hates - I can't stand the stuff it's boring, sticky and takes forever!
But every child has to experience it at some point in their lives, so now was the time to use it to create Dinosaur eggs.
As it was the first time for J and M, I kept it small and went with the flow. I started by blowing up 3 small balloons, and cutting up large pieces of kitchen paper and set to work glueing the paper onto the balloon, I told them both they have to cover it until you couldn't see any of the colour from the balloons - this took about 3 layers and LOTS of glue.
I would recommend a few more layers to make them stronger but attention span was fading (me just as much as the children)
We then hung them up to dry over the weekend, I explained we needed to let the eggs "grow" and get stronger before they become real dinosaur eggs. (Just to add to the imagination they don't really grow but do become stronger as they dry)
By the time I had returned on Monday they had dried and were harder, so we set about decorating the "eggs" with a bit of colour, I let J and M chose their own colours and we all painted them differently, once all painted again we hung them to dry overnight.
Once the paint had dried it was time to find out if all our hard work was about to pay off or become a complete waste of time.
I carefully popped the balloon and watched in anticipating as the "egg" held its shape!
We have since been using our dinosaur eggs to add to the dinosaur world/islands and dinosaur figures for small world imaginative play. Because we all decided on different colours J says that this is because there are different dinosaurs inside each - Diplodocus, Triceritops, and T-Rex to name a few.
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