I wonder why Dinosaurs Ruled product reviews

My four year old son is a dinosaur fanatic - probably like most four year old boys! He saw that I had a dinosaur book to review and immediately took it off my pile and sat down to look at it by himself. His initial reaction was "its incredible!". He talked about the images of the dinosaurs, choose the scariest one and talked about what he already knew about the individual dinosaurs. He then found the stickers. He wanted to have all of them and I had to explain that they went with the different pages.

Even when the book is really aimed at a higher age level than four, the subject matter means that my son was very excited to get into it. Guided reading and exploration of the book worked really well for this age range. I think that older children would love to take a book like this away on holiday as it would keep them entertained with a variety of activities in one book.

I liked the variety of facts, stickers, games and ability for children to use some of their own imagination to work their way through the book. Each night we have read a few pages and discussed what we read. My son was able to practise a number of skills as he worked through the book, I was amazed an how careful he was with the placement of the stickers and this helped develop his and eye co-ordination and fine motor control. With the ability to write most letters, but not always that keen on writing, he was very happy to write in some of the boxes in this book. It is all about interest and he certainly was interested in this book.

He found that the choose-your-own-adventure part of the book a little tricky as he didn't want to make the wrong choice and get eaten by the dinosaur!! It took a bit of encouragement for him to begin to make choices.

I think that this book had a perfect mix of activities and facts for children to get engrossed in learning, enjoyment and imagination. I see from the website listed on the back cover that there are many books in the series. I think that they would all appeal to my son.

As I finished writing this review, my son has come to sit beside me with his dinosaur book. He is working his way through the choose-your-own-adventure part of the book and enjoying the fact that I am getting eaten by the dinosaur. I guess he has figured that if he doesn't like getting eaten by the dinosaur but enjoyed the game, he can just get Mummy eaten and the fun can continue!

This activity book was quite like the amazing animals book, but this is obviously about dinosaurs instead. This is another subject near and dear to my daughter's heart. She enjoys talking about dinosaurs and playing with her plastic ones. She knows a fair bit about dinosaurs, so again we had fun with the quizzes and other activities.

I enjoyed the pick a path style activity running down the bottom of the book, and we had a laugh as we played along with this. I wasn't always sure what the answer should be, which was great. It meant I was learning as much as she was, along the way. We got eaten the first time far too quickly!

The other activity we tried was naming the museum and setting up the statues. This sparked an activity outside of the book, where she made a brochure for her own zoo. It was a bird zoo, and she outlined some of the great birds she would have. While this wasn't part of the dinosaur activity book, it did inspire her to take the idea further which I think is a win as far as the book was concerned. With anything I buy, I want her to be creative and think outside of the box and this book did bring her to do that which was cool.

The stickers are great. Possibly not as exciting as the animal stickers, but again there were some freeform stickers that could be used anywhere. I did also struggle with the dinosaur names and pronouncing things. This is something I always struggle with, but a sounding out key would have been a good addition here. Otherwise, a fab book and it will be a great resource for us later.

Dinosaurs, for my five year old dinosaurs are right up there with dessert and biscuits. So when I saw the chance to review this I threw my hand up in the air and gave a very excited 'yay' when it was confirmed that I would get a copy, honestly I think I was more excited than he would be.

You open up the book and the design is lovely. There's a short, three question, true or false quiz, you then get to name your dinosaur museum and then after reading seven options you get to pick what you want to start your museum with (my five year old chose a baby dinosaur fossil and the world's biggest dinosaur fossil). Then you get given a scenario, you pick your answer out of two possibles and off you go to that page.

My five year old would have happily finished the book in one sitting, but life calls and so the first look at the book we only did four pages, and that seemed to be the perfect amount per sitting. The favourite page so far has been where he got to name a new dinosaur, give it a meaning, eight, length, height, age and then finally draw it.

My five year old really enjoyed this book and wants to do some of the pages again, a problem solved by grabbing a blank bit of paper and doing the activity on there. A great, fun book and I would get the others in this series.