On the very last day of the nursery term my 4 year old youngest son was given his first reading book by his teachers. It was Harry and The Dinosaurs Had Fun. After reading this one with me a couple of times, he was suddenly very enthusiastic about this particular character, so I looked through our books we own and found this one.

We have an absolute abundance of books in our house. Not only do I go a bit nutty buying books myself, but we also qualify for Dolly Parton's Imagination library where every child aged under 5 in Rotherham gets a free book sent via the post once a month. This book must have been in our house at least 18 months, and although read at first, it had been pushed aside for more popular stories until my son's renewed interest in this character. It's a shame really we have more than we know what to do with as he has actually really enjoyed hearing this one again.

This is a simple story, I would recommend that it is for children of at least two years old, and up to 4 and at a push, 5 years olds will sit and listen to this. The story is a pretty simple one presented over 6 sets of double pages. Harry is playing hide and seek with his toy dinosaurs. As he wanders round the house, he finds them hiding behind cushions, in Gran's knitting basket, in Mum's boot. Finally Harry hides and the dinosaurs find him.

There is a bit of a flap book element to this story, with the second page actually being a folded in page with some holes. For example, on the first double paged spread, you can see Harry bending down to look at a blue cushion. The cushion is actually a cut out shape and when you lift the page up, there is a different picture of Harry finding a dinosaur under the blue cushion. While the pictures are linked, there is a bit of artistic license to the situation in my opinion. As you fold out the page, the word for the colour is printed on the page too. I do like the way the colours are used in this book so you are re-inforcing learning without it seeming like it.

My 5 year old son can read quite well these days, but because there are quite complicated dinosaur names in the story, he didn't fancy reading it for us. He wanted me to read through it and for him to read the word of the colour. My 4 year old was more concerned with being the one who got to lift the page up to see what was hiding. The pages in this are quite a thick paper, but one of our pages has been torn when the boys were younger and a bit more over-enthusiastic about lifting flaps.

I feel this book is more for parents to read to their child rather than early readers tackling themselves for reasons already given. I don't blame my son for shying away from reading it as I find I have to really think about how to pronounce the dinosaur names too, and I only manage it as we have seen them phonetically spelt out elsewhere in another book we own. They can be a bit tongue twisting.

This is a fun little book, which has had a little short lived reprieve in our household. Really, I think we are coming to the end of this type of story but the boys cling on to it. This is published by Puffin books, and it has a RRP of £5.99.