Dinosaur Island

Babyebi was taking his afternoon nap a couple of days ago when he was rudely woken up by the postman, this meant I had one grumpy little chap on my hands, that was until he opened the tube that the postie had bought with him. Inside were a load of little dinosaurs from my counting swap partner, Carol. Suddenly grumpy pants had disappeared and we had a happy chappie in the house again.

So this morning I knocked up some islands on the computer, they are no works of art but if you would like to download them go over to flickr you should see a set called "dinosaur island" on the right-hand-side there are thumbnails of all the pictures in the set.

Click on one of the pictures, to the right there is a link in blue "different sizes" click on the link

Above the picture it should say "download the medium size" you could use this but for better quality pictures click on the "original" size and then download it. (repeat for other files)

You should have the jpg file on you computer to print out as you like.....fingers crossed.

To play, place the islands all round the room, I made it quite easy to find them the first time then stepped it up a notch the second time round by hiding them up the stairs and in the bathroom too. The child then takes a basket of 55 objects, we used dinosaurs but shells, pirates, treasure, nuts... anything could be used instead. It is important to have 55 objects so that when the child gets to the last island if he/she doesn't have the correct amount of objects left it means they have made a mistake (control of error) and so they need to go back and check the other islands.

If the child does not yet recognise the numerals then a matching game could be played with the islands, set them out as above but give the child a number card instead of the counters and ask them to find island number '7' etc. The game can be played in reverse (AKA tidying up) when you ask the child to go and fetch island number '4'.

Babyebi had a lot of fun with this and the first thing he said when we got home after shopping was "play dinosaur islands?"

If anyone else has any other counting games, I'd love to hear about them.

And there is still time to sign up for the continent swap, come on, you know you want to......