Preventing Dinosaur Toy Confusion

Children often have friends over to play.  With the spring term, half-term holiday Mums and Dads may be glad that chums have come over to help play, anything to keep their young charges occupied.  Playing with dinosaur toys can be fun, but when another child brings his or her dinosaurs with them, then this can lead to problems.  The prehistoric models can get mixed up, how do you sor them out?  How to go about untangling dinosaurs?

Untangling Dinosaurs

Toys tend to get mixed up and even our dinosaur experts cannot tell which dinosaur toy belongs to which child.  This can lead to problems, but a suggestion provided by a busy Mum who did not want to have her daughter’s “herd” of dinosaurs mixed up with her friend’s collection may provide the answer.

Taking some water-based paint from one of her daughter’s paint sets, she applied a dab of green paint to the underneath of the dinosaur models.  She chose an area on the underside of the toy so that this little spot of paint did not spoil the look of the model.   She took care not to obscure any writing on the underside, as sometimes the prehistoric animal’s name is printed on the base or on the tummy of the beastie in question.  Now her daughter’s friends can bring over their own dinosaur toys and models without fear of them getting mixed up.  All the adults have to do when tidying up is to look at the underside of the toy and identify which is which by the dab of paint.

A Dab of Paint

This simple idea works well, most children have a paint set of some sort and by painting on a colour key, dinosaur toys should not be confused in future.  Blue or red works quite well when it comes to choice of colour.  Avoid yellow if you can, as often the belly of a dinosaur toy is a light shade and a yellow spot of paint might be more difficult to see.

Sorting Out Prehistoric Animal Models

Dinosaur and prehistoric animal models. Untangling dinosaurs.

Mini dinosaur and prehistoric animal models. If the models get mixed up during play, how do you sort them out?

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

If the child wants to take some dinosaur toys (or indeed any plastic toys), away with them as the family visits relatives then this is fine.  The paint job on the underside should ensure that all the child’s toys can be identified and returned home safely without any getting mixed up.

Robust Creative Play

With all the robust, creative play that dinosaur toys can encourage, the use of a spot of paint to help identify which models belong to which budding palaeontologist can save a lot of confusion and prevent tantrums.  The only thing that needs to be checked is to make sure that the Mum of the child you are visiting hasn’t had the same good idea.  After all, it would be hard to separate two sets of dinosaur toys, with each one having a red blob of paint on the belly – perhaps two dabs of paint is required, just to make sure.  Hopefully this little tip will avoid any difficulties when it comes to dinosaur toys for children.

For inexpensive dinosaur models, toys and games, visit Everything Dinosaur’s award-winning website: Dinosaur Toys and Gifts.