The Mine-o-saur!
Posted by ScottDecember 28, 2009
It’s a good thing we love The Mine-o-saur so much, because Chick Pea absolutely adores it! For the last couple of weeks this has been a nightly read for her. We’ve been reading it to her once or twice ourselves, then she gives it a shot. Sure, she’s only reciting what she can remember of the words, but it’s so fun to see her slide her finger across the page as we’ve modeled for her. She’s definitely aware that the words on the page are what we are speaking, and she turns the pages at the appropriate times. She also enjoys naming all the letters in the words and reciting their sounds. We’re one step away from putting the sounds together!
The story may be a little advanced for some toddlers, and we’re not sure that she’s picked up on the small nuances of the story, but we go a little further than the text of the book to explain to her that the other dinosaurs are sad when the Mine-o-saur screams “MINE MINE MINE” and they don’t want to play with him. “Que feo, Mami!”
We’ve been applying the book to daily life when her selfish side comes out–”Do you want to be a Mine-o-saur, or a Share-o-saur?” So what if the book never mentions a “Share-o-saur”? 
Some other fun things we do with this book is practice counting objects–cars, balls, green creatures, purple creatures, etc. The last page of the book shows 11 or 12 dinosaurs huddled together. We make it a point to let her count all the eyeballs with each reading, and since she’s still having trouble with the numbers past 14, it gives us a chance to model that as well.
Overall, one of the favorite books in our family library!
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Our boys love this book. We found out that if we stop reading and take a pause while reading this book at fun words like “strudel bread” and “snack time”…that our boys will save the words where we pause. When we first discovered it, we thought our 2yr was a genius, but then again we had read the book enough time to him that he probably had it memorized.
I still can’t pronounce all the dino’s names :0)
Haha…the memorization is a good thing though! It shows they are beginning to understand that the words on the page translate into a spoken word. Don’t sell your 2yo short just yet, he could still be a genius!
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