Every child loves to explore dinosaurs. This week you can engage your families in discovering dinosaurs. Included are simple activities that will help keep them busy in all areas. All free and accessible right here.
Reading
I’m pretty sure that every home has a few dinosaur books! Here are some of our favorites. Danny and the Dinosaur, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, If the Dinosaurs Came Back, The Day of the Dinosaurs and A-Z Dinosaurs. I always like to introduce a theme with a book.
Epic is a website that has thousands of books available. We have a subscription from my kids school, but it says the first month is free. It can be a great source for books. Many of which can be read aloud by the computer or the device your child prefers.
I love to find poems or little rhymes that go with the theme. My kids love moving to these and us can use them to help with vocabulary and repetition. Here are some I found for dinosaurs.
I always try to bring high frequency words into our day. You can do this so many ways. I have a set of flashcards I keep in the car, we play games with them or even use them for writing purposes.
Dinosaur Sight Word Game: For this activity I had a stack of words. Each child drew a card and wrote the word in a box on their paper. (The game has sight words with dinosaur themed, but I didn’t want to use all of my ink to make it. I’ve found my basic flashcards work great for any game). It doesn’t matter what they are doing the more repetition they get, the better reader they will become.
Writing
I read If the Dinosaurs Came Back. Then we talked about all of the things my kids would do if they came back. I created a writing sheet for them to write their name and then write what they would do if they came back. With early learning its always good to provide multiple ways for them to express their writing. Will (3) colors, Olive (4) colors and writes a few letters then has me transcribe for her, and Nixon (6) does both.
Math
Take a dice, roll it, record number in square and take that number of dinosaurs. Roll again and take dinosaurs. Then add your dinosaurs together. This game is great because it reinforces counting, writing and addition.
Create a dinosaur using basic shapes.
Measuring dinosaurs. Have you ever read Prehistoric Actual Size? I think this my favorite activity of the week. It shows small glimpses of each dinosaur and then tells information about them. (Unfortunately due to March snow storms we couldn’t do it but can’t wait for warmer weather so we can give it a try.) Take the information from the book and draw the lengths of the dinosaurs on the sidewalk around our block. It really is amazing to see how truly big the dinosaurs really were.
Due to copy rights I’m not posting detailed information from the book, but I wrote the name of each prehistoric animal and their size on a sheet of paper. Amazon has a preview of several of the animals, but if you have older kids you could have them research them. I printed off the glossary of the book that provided a little information about each animal. I plan to stick them in the grass next to each chalked measurement and let the neighbors know about our prehistoric walk about.
Art
One of the benefits of incorporating art into a curriculum is that it makes connections that sometimes don’t happen. This week we created dinosaur fossils with q-tips and noodles. I printed these dinosaur heads and then the kids glued the bones to the paper.
Name-asaurus: Create a handprint dinosaur and name it after your child.
Centers
- Vocabulary: review Dinosaur words and sort dinosaurs. Sorting by names and size. Here are some other word cards to help with sorting.
- Dinosaur Names: Letter recognition is great for early learners. One of my favorite things to start with is their names. Here is a template for the dinosaur and spines to write name letters inside.
- Sensory Fossil Dig: create fossils with salt dough and hide in sand, rice or beans. One recipe made a tray worth of fossils and left us with some dough to make dinosaur footprints in.
- Movement: Check out this easy movement cube to get your kids moving like dinosaurs. You can even use them as a deck of cards. It would be fun to have the kids make up their own too.
Additional Resources
- Dinosaur- Preschool Pinterest board from A Teaspoon of Home
- Magic School Bus and the Busasaurus NETFLIX (Season 2, Episode 4)
- Dinosaur Train (PBS kids- free app on all devices)
- Florida Center for Reading Recovery (Free online center activities for all levels of readers.)
- K-12 Reader (Free online resources for reading k-12)
