One of the stories we are reading a lot at the moment is Tyrannosaurus Drip by Julia Donaldson. It’s a great rhyming story, not the easiest one to read to be honest, but with a lot of hidden meanings and discoveries to make. The story is about Drip, a duckbill dinosaur that ends up in the wrong nest and is raised as a T-rex. But he really does not feel at home with this family and one day he runs away and ends up with a herd of duckbills, the dinosaurs that the tyrannosauruses want to eat. –spoiler– When the T-s finally have a way to get to the duckbills, Drip scares them off with their own disfigured reflections in the water.
Our boys find this concept very interesting; of course they know about mirrors and they have seen reflections before. But recently I realised that the story really had stayed on their minds… Last week it had been raining and there were quite a few puddles on the street. On the way home from school, they suddenly stop their bikes in the middle of the sidewalk.
‘Mom, I see the clouds’, one of them says, pointing down.
‘Mom, I see the sky’, the other one says, also looking down.
At first I am confused, but then I see what they mean. The sun has come out and the sky is reflected in the puddle.
Then one of the says: ‘It’s just like the story, mommy.’
From there on they run from one puddle to the next to see what else there is to see ‘in the ground’; houses, windows, street lanterns, cars, even an airplane. And then of course their own faces. It was so great to see how much fun they had.