The Pirates Vs The Land of the Living Dinosaurs

I've been doing all i can recently to throw myself in to Opeie's new love by coming up with fun themed things to do and places to go. A couple of months back a friend of mine put up some images on Facebook and I got really excited. Her little boy was looking very excited standing among life size dinosaurs and it looked AMAZING! I assumed that they were on holiday and that the attraction was going to be miles away so i was pleasantly surprised when I contacted them and found out that the awesome looking dinosaurs we had seen were just down the road at the West midlands Safari Park. I had not been to the Safari park since I was a boy myself so i had no idea about the Land of the Living Dinosaurs.

Although the trip was for the boys i was really excited to see some big scary dinosaurs after all of the books we have been reading together. As we pulled into the main entrance of the safari park we spotted two dinosaurs waiting to greet us and i knew we were in for a great visit. It was fairly early when we arrived and we made a Bee line for the Land of the Living Dinosaurs which was really quiet as the bulk of the visitors had gone straight for the Safari tour.

Being able to sit in the jaws of a dinosaur pretty much kicked off our Mesazoic adventure. I was in my element which is still surprising me to this day. Like most boys I was a big fan of the dinosaurs and I was captivated when we did a project at school, but that's as far as my Dinosaur love affair went. This time though like some sort of parasite I have been feeding off Opeie's excitement and passion. The great thing about being a hands on parent is that when your child is into something you can go all out and throw yourselves in to a world of fun.

As we passed the Dino jaws and rounded the corner, all those books that we had read, documentaries we had watched and never ending dinosaur activities we had been keeping ourselves entertained with over the weeks was staring us in the face. It was like all the previous weeks fun had been building up to this very moment and i was loving every minute of the expressions on the boys faces. Its that kind of moment that really makes you realise that as a dad, you are doing an awesome job.

THERE ARE DINOSAURS EVERYWHERE!!!

With tales swinging and heads moving about watching you, The Land of the living Dinosaurs really was an amazing place to visit, the fantastic weather really added to the day and we were all having an awesome time.

The only negative about the trip was that there was a board with information for the Archaeopteryx (Opeie's joint favourite dinosaur, with the Triceratops) but no feathery dinosaur to be seen anywhere? A little disappointing but there were so many other dinosaurs there that Opeie soon forgot about that.

"Mommy, mommy......A TRICERATOPS!!!"

Only half way round the park and Opeie's day had reached its peak but there was more to come. He was hoping for at least one Triceratops and there they were, his beaming little face said it all. As if a life size Triceratops wasn't enough the boys then spotted two to ride on, AMAZING!

Next we moved on to the Dino dig area, where there was a dino handler taking care or a baby raptor which was really cute. Opeie gave it a stroke and then began to explain to the lady that the raptor was a 'Therapod' and if it was a Velociraptor it was Cretaceous but an Eoraptor was Triassic. The poor staff member looked at him like he was talking another language haha.

The Dino dig area gave Seth a great idea for something we could do at home and as I like to accommodate as many of the boys creative ideas as I can, I put his idea into motion this week. I'll write about it very soon, but it was an amazing idea.

I was really hoping to see my favourite dinosaur during the visit. So you can imagine my excited when I spotted a Pachycephalosaurus staring at me. By this point I had reached excitement overload, it was such a great place to take Mrs M and boys, interesting and educational.

From a home education point the West Midlands safari park is a great learning resource and the opening of the exhibit couldn't have come at a better time for us as a family, with dinosaurs being at the forefront of everything we do these days.

The Land of the Living Dinosaurs was a fantastic place to visit, interesting and educational and I would love to visit again later in the year when they have the dinosaurs at night event. I bet the dinosaurs look great in the dark. I think Opeie's love of dinosaurs will be around for a while and no matter how many fun activities we do and places we go it will be hard to beat the excitement we got from spending an afternoon with real dinosaurs.

"You may be different, but we're all creatures. All dinosaurs have different features."

The subject of 'how much time our children spend in front of the TV' seems to come up quite a bit amongst friends, it's a hot topic. Although we don't have a TV license at home the boys do squeeze in a bit of Netflix between all the other exciting things that we get up to. I love the fact that with Netflix we can keep an eye easier on what the boys are watching. For us, most importantly, is the fact that they are not subjected to the utter tripe on TV (including most importantly, the news).

I've been really impressed recently how well Netfix and the books we are reading have been working hand in hand and it's got me asking 'is screen time really bad for your children if you are picking what they are watching?'. The blog has been a bit 'Dinosaur' heavy recently  but Opeie's fascination in the subject has got me hooked. We've been reading all sorts of books and doing dinosaur activities, then a few weeks back we sat down to eat lunch and Opeie asked if there were any kids dinosaur programmes on Netflix. We had been watching the walking with dinosaurs series but I think Opeie wanted something a little less bleak so I searched 'dinosaur'. This is where we first found dinosaur train and if I am honest I have been as hooked as Opeie ever since. This show is what all kids TV should be like, fun, colourful and with fascinating educational content. We've both learnt so much about dinosaurs over the last few weeks and Opeie has been soaking it up.

The last month or so of Dinosaur fun has been awesome and we've ploughed though all the books we can find in our local libraries but what has blown me away is what Opeie has picked up from the show while I've been making lunch in the afternoons. He has explained to me how to tell if a dinosaur is a theropod, which dinosaurs were from which time period (including a woman's jaw dropping when me and Opeie were playing dinosaurs in Ikea and I said 'I'll be a Giganotosaurus", to which Opeie replied "they were found in South America!)". As he stood at the counter in Holland and Barrett last week he informed both myself and the staff that Archaeopteryx means 'old feather', he is full on entertainment and his passion for dinosaurs is addictive.

So is screen time really that bad?

When I started to write this post it got me thinking about all the things me and Mrs M have have learnt over the years from Netflix. All the Ted talks we have watch and fascinating documentaries, including the ones that changed my diet (yes Netflix stopped me eating meat and dairy). There are a huge amount of educational resources out there, if you have young children then Dinosaur train is a must, slightly older kids? Horrible histories is amazing. Switch your TV on and take full advantage of the information that Netflix is making available to you, it's worth every penny of your monthly subscription.

from Archaeopteryx to Zuniceratops, the dinosaur ABC

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs.... it's all about the Dinosaurs, Opeie is hooked and he has surprisingly dragged his brother in on all the excitement. These wonderful beasts have kept us well entertained over the last few weeks with some great themed activities. Earlier this week me and Opeie were chatting about his new favourite subject and we got on to the topic of whether there is a dinosaur for every letter of the alphabet. Obviously a conversation like that is clearly going to kick start an activity.

I wanted to answer Opeie's question but i didn't know myself so aside from the fun of finding out if we could complete a dinosaur ABC i wanted to show Opeie how we find the information we need. We headed down to out local library, we can walk to which is great so we went looking for books that could help us with our task. I'm always surprised at how quiet our library is most of the time. We've been there today and considering it is the school holiday and it was raining out it was a ghost town. 

With a stack of books to scan out we headed home and found out a big roll of paper ready for our fun research activity. We wrote A-Z down the one side of the page and then started by seeing how much we could fill in from the information we knew ourselves. I thought Opeie would go straight in for his favourite Triceratops but he actually started from 'A' and shouted Archaeopteryx which i was really impressed by, followed by Brachiosaurus. C was our first issue but we did manage to fill in quite a few before turning to our first research device, books.

As expected there was a great source of research material at the library and as we sat in the hallway surrounded by books we looked through them together hoping to fill in all the blanks from our dinosaur ABC.  We managed two thirds of our activity before Opeie wanted to move on to something else, so today we picked up where we left off and got stuck in hoping to complete what we had started. This time though we had Seth on hand who turned out to be an excellent researcher.

We had looked through around 20 Dinosaur books but we still hadn't completed our A-Z so we moved on to our next place for information, the internet. Now i know we could have just gone straight on to the internet to get all the relevant information we needed but wheres the fun in that? The boys love reading and going to the library and i think it is really important for them to know that that information is there readily available to them, i did explain though that sometimes the books and information are not always on hand and that is where the internet will reign supreme.

The National History Museum's Dino directory filled in all the gaps we needed. Saying that though we were only missing F,J,X,Y and Z so we had done pretty well. We also learned some interesting facts too as we searched on the 'in your country' section and found out that 23 dinosaurs were discovered in England, we are unsure how accurate this is though as Opeie pointed out that all the Pterosaurs were missing from the directory.

 Thanks to some great researching from the boys we found a dinosaur for every letter of the alphabet and picked up some great dinosaur facts a long the way. I cant stress to people that i meet enough about the importance of using the library and the information that is available to you cost free. Having access to that kind of literature is a great tool for children to be able to use in all aspects of their learning.

Now its time for me to do some research of my own for the next big Dino activity...

ROOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!!

*NOTE, Opeie was so excited about 'W for Wooley Mammoth that I didn't have the heart to tell him.
 

"I hear the pitter patter of a dinosaur"

There will probably be a few short posts pop up over the next couple of days as Opeie has declared it 'Dinosaur week'. It seems that the new Jurassic World LEGO kits kick started something laying dormant that we thought was extinct. Then a great surprise delivery from Nintendo just got this week of dino appreciation started. 

To celebrate the release of Yoshi's Wooly world on Wii U, Nintendo have created these adorable knitted Amiibo's which started the conversation of 'what other Dinosaurs do you think Yoshi would be friends with?' Opeie informed me that as Triceratops (his favourite dinosaur) is a Herbivore, so they would be great friends as they wouldn't eat each other! So as the package came full of craft items also we decided to kick of 'Dinosaur week' with a Triceratops mask.

After creating our masks we had lunch while watching Walking with Dinosaurs on Netflix. I had to turn it off after one episode though when a dinosaur stuck its nose in another Dinosaurs nest and ate its baby. There was a genuine look of distress on Opeie's face, luckily there was a great selection of dinosaur themed shows so we replaced that bleak (but interesting) look at the prehistoric era with Jim Hensons 'Dinosaur Train' (much more appropriate for a four year old).

All that was left then of  'Dinosaur week' day 1, was to strap a Triceratops puppet to front of his Micro Scooter and head out on a Dino hunting adventure.

Note: While watching walking with Dinosaurs Opeie asked " where are they filming this? because we don't have dinosaurs in this country!!

Love that innocent little angel.

Yoshi's woolly world is out now and we can't wait to give it a play, until then though Roooooaaaarrrr!!!