Dinosaur Roar! by Paul and Henrietta Stickland is an absolute classic of a book for young children. First published in 1994, it celebrates it's 20th birthday this year and loads of fantastic goodies have been released including an app. and a whole new Dinosaur Roar! website.




My oldest child was born in 1994, and Dinosaur Roar! is a book that's been in our collection in various forms since he was small. The illustrations are gorgeous, the dinosaurs have amazing character and depth, and the text introduces all kinds of useful concepts and new words to a younger child.

As your child grows and starts to learn to read, Dinosaur Roar! offers a brilliant opportunity to practice familiar sounds and words. The minimal text isn't intimidating to a child of any age and most of the words are easily worked out phonetically.


The text is written in a lovely rhyme that leads you through the book, but keeps gentle pace and allows for lots of great voices!






The app. has 3 sections ~ Read, Colour and Name.

Read is (as you'd expect) the book itself and has 3 different options. Read To Me is the book read by children and it's very lovely. There's lots of expression and it's very clearly spoken. It's also incredibly easy to navigate through the e-book. Read Aloud is without the audio of the children reading, and Record allows you to record yourself reading along with the illustrations and text.


Colour has all of the dinosaurs from the book for your child to colour in. they can choose their own colour scheme, or select to fill in with the colours from the book. It's really simple and you can't 'go over the lines', so it's not frustrating for a little one, but they can still play about with the colours and easily give their dinosaur blue legs and a stripey tummy with a dotty head if they wish.


Name is a Dinosaur-name generator. Type in your own name and shake the iPad, and you will be given a Dinosaur name. My boys loved this, they thought it was hilarious!


I was a little disappointed as this is designed for younger children aged 2-4 and the keyboard is in capitals. Although my 5 year old was okay with that, my 4 year old didn't know that E is e and stubbornly spent ages trying to spell his name. I easily found I could change the on screen text to lower case, but couldn't find an option to change the keyboard - which even confused my 5 year old!


The app. is fairly simple, but it's only priced at £1.99, so I think that's very fair, and a percentage of the royalties from sales go to support the work of the Natural History Museum. It's currently only available on IOS, so available from the Apple store here.


If you want to become as good at drawing as Paul Stickland, you'll need to practice. On his website Paul has free printable colouring sheets and pages from Dinosaur Roar! and Ten Terrible Dinosaurs, and he teamed up with The Guardian Newspaper to create a step-by-step guide to drawing Dinosaur Roar! which you can find here.

I've really enjoyed being part of the jury panel for the LEGO DUPLO How Do You Play competition. Next week I'll be helping to judge all of the finalists in the last round, which will decide who will win a holiday to Billund in Denmark to the original LEGOLAND.


If you haven't yet entered, you only have 2 more days to do so! It's incredibly easy, you just film your children playing with their DUPLO. We want to see imagination and creativity in action. Submit your video of no more than 30 seconds to the app. on the LEGO DUPLO Facebook page.
 

My first DUPLO Giveaway to win the Creative Picnic set still has 2 weeks to run (you can enter here), and my second DUPLO giveaway is the Creative Cakes set 6785. Suitable for children from age 2, it has 55 chunky pieces which are too big to swallow, and includes everything you need to enjoy an afternoon tea party or recreate a birthday.


Birthdays are very important to children, and they learn a lot from them. It teaches about passage of time and celebration, it allows the child to feel very special and valued. Birthdays will form some of your child's earliest permanent memories. Being able to 'play' birthdays is huge fun for children and gives them a real starting point for some fantastic imaginative play and story-telling.


The Creative Cakes set has a recommended retail price of £19.99 and is an ideal starter set for a child new to LEGO DUPLO, or a brilliant addition to bricks you already have.


As I have to pay postage the giveaway is UK only, my apologies to everyone else. Entry to the giveaway is by rafflecopter form below. The first question is mandatory and must be answered as a comment to this post. Extra entries can be gained by completing additional tasks within the rafflecopter form. Please read the additional terms and conditions at the bottom of the rafflecopter form. This giveaway will end at midnight Friday 6th June when the timer will end and no more entries will be allowed.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I like to be as 'green' as possible - for everyone's benefit - but sometimes we all need a hand, and sometimes the green option is to not throw things away. Dr Beckmann have been making cleaning products for over 30 years, and they have saved many of my items from the bin over the years.



If you have children, cook, garden, craft or do home mechanics then you know all about stains. Modern washing powers and liquids are brilliant, but even they can't get everything.


Dr Beckmann has a Stain Devil for almost anything. I always seem to need them to remove felt tip, blood and greasemarks, but the Stain Devils Survival Kit will actually deal with at least 50 different stains.

It takes seconds to dab the Stain Devil onto the material, and then it's guaranteed to start working within 3 minutes, so I find Stain Devils are an incredibly useful product to keep in stock to treat clothes before you do a wash.

Some surprising listings there....who'd have thought it - soot!

If you remove the stain and save the clothes, you save money and prevent waste - if you save your little ones favourite Star Wars t-shirt then you might just score some hero points too.


Dishwashers seem like a resource heavy item, but in fact they aren't. Using ours is saving us around £1 a week in energy and each full load uses at least half the water that my teenagers used to use to wash by hand.

In order to work properly and remain hygienic they need regular maintenance. A deep-clean once every two months (one month for a family like ours) kills off all the bugs and bacteria, and removes the residues that build up inside.


Dr Beckmann's 'Service It' Deep Clean Dishwasher Cleaner has a wipe to clean the door seals on your dishwasher, and then a sachet that you pour into your machine before running a cycle with the dishwasher empty.


My dishwasher is only a year old, so I'm still looking after it and have been using a cleaner regularly. This one didn't have a residual smell like others I've used, and my dishwasher looks great. I was very impressed with the door seal wipe too - it's an important part of the machine and not something we should forget about.


I first bought GloWhite 25 years ago for my work shirts and it's never let me down in all this time. It can really revitalise whites and bring them back from dingy to crisp. I also love the GloWhite for net curtains.


These days GloWhite can be used at really low temperatures, making it even more handy for man-made fibres, items with elastane etc. and it's better for the environment.


It's also easier to use - it comes in a handy in-wash sachet that you just bung in with the washload and throw away afterwards. GloWhite also contains UV sun protection, so your clothes will last longer.
 

Carpet Stain Remover is something we've all needed at one point or another I'm sure. Whether it's the carpet, the sofa or the inside of the car, a bottle like this makes the job far easier and avoids any wastage as you can target the area you want to clean, and don't have to mix up huge amounts with water which then get poured away.


It's also waaay easier if what you're cleaning up is red wine and you already had your first glass....

I've used Dr Beckmann Carpet Cleaner before. On carpets in my house and in a mobile home, and I was really happy with it. I haven't had chance to try my new one yet, but the little boys bedroom is being tidied up next weekend and there are bound to be plenty of areas of carpet that need attention...

Dr Beckmann products are available from a multitude of shops nationwide.

Stain Devils Survival Kit RRP £3.99 
Service It Deep Clean Dishwasher Cleaner RRP £2.99
Glowhite Super Whitener with UV Sun Protector RRP £1.89
Carpet Stain Remover RRP £3.59

Alpha and Omega 3 The Great Wolf Games is a familiar tale about underdogs who come through and beat the odds and show their true value. This is the 3rd Alpha and Omega movie, but you don't need to have seen the other 2 to appreciate it.

So, despite my partner's best efforts at being seriously ill last week, I made it to Blog On again! Yeeeay.

What a top do! I was fortunate to be invited to the CBiasUk sponsored meal at the Hard Rock Cafe on Saturday night. It didn't go entirely to plan with the tables being ready around an hour late, we ended up being offered dessert well after 11pm (which is too late when you have to be back in town for 10am next morning) but overall it was a really nice evening.

There was a lot of this....


An awful lot of this....


And some of this....

A while ago I told you about the LEGO Star Wars Intergalactic Dream Bedroom Competition. A competition where children had to design their own bedroom and for one lucky winner the team from LEGO would build it for them.

The winner was 5 year old Milun Simpson from Knebworth in Hertfordshire, with a great drawing that had loads of detail.

Along with a bunch of other Britmums Bloggers, very kindly gave me vouchers to go and buy our food for the Bank Holiday weekend and test if their produce is just as good now that they've lowered everyday prices. How could I refuse?

I had a really nice letter in the post today. The sticker on the envelope was incredibly familiar...


And when I opened it....



 

I love my children's school....they know that to a young child family is everything, and they always talk about home and share stories and care about each other's lives away from school. It really enriches the children's knowledge and social skills, and encourages reluctant talkers. Two days ago my son came home explaining to me all about someone's baby brother's tongue tie, and yesterday it was a birthday so they all ate cake and sang.


Today 5 year old son's group made my partner a card.  It's even got everyone's signature inside. It's the best Get Well Soon card ever, and possibly the cutest.

Must be working too, he had some scrambled eggs for tea :o)