Dinosaur Fun with Reference Books!

A friend asked me yesterday how you know if you're encouraging your child in a hobby that the child really wants to do, or if you are just pushing them towards an activity that you want them to want to do. Difficult question! And I'm not about to provide you with a wise answer, either, cos I haven't got one! But I did find myself asking myself the same question last night after I'd put my little book bugs to bed. You see, I love dinosaurs ( see this post, too), and recently my bugs are getting into them as well. Am I forcing them to by giving them cool books about them and wanting to play dinosaurs at any available moment? Or am I just offering them something interesting that they can take or leave? Who knows?! But I'm definitely going to make the most of it while it lasts!

I'm going to talk about two books today, both of them reference books, not stories. This is one of them:

Larousse Enciclopedia Increïble: Dinosaures, 2010

Our copy's in Catalan, and I've found it in Spanish too, but it doesn't appear to be published in English :-(  But I do want to tell you why we like it and what we get out of it anyway, then you can see for yourselves what you can find in whatever language you need! And if you can use it in either Spanish or Catalan, I thoroughly recommend it!

Dinosaur Roar, Paul & Henrietta Stickland

I love dinosaurs! This lovely book is a picture catalogue of dinosaurs big and small who are all different but share one thing in common: they're all hungry! The beautiful ink illustrations feature fangs and claws galore in a fantastic parade of real and invented dinosaurs, and the rhyming text links them in pairs of opposites: fast/slow, above/below etc. 

Why not use it with emerging readers, too? The repetition produced by the rhyme gives practice with several different letter combinations.

There's loads to talk about in this book: colours, parts of the body, or the adjectives suggested by the text itself. Great for natives and non-natives.

Español: ¡Me encantan los dinosaurios! Este divertido libro es un catálogo de dinosaurios grandes y pequeños, todos diferentes pero con una cosa en común: ¡todos tienen hambre! Las preciosas ilustraciones en tinta muestran una serie de dinosaurios variopinta, repleta de garras y dientes afilados, y el texto los junta en parejas de opuestos: lento/rápido, encima/debajo, etc.

¿Porqué no usarlo en las primeras fases de la lectura en inglés también? La repetición que proporcionan las rimas facilita la práctica de varias combinaciones de letras.

Este libro da mucho de que hablar con los peques: los colores, las partes del cuerpo, o los mismos adjetivos reflejados en el texto. Muy divertido para nativos y no nativos.