Source by: Only Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs may be extinct, but the interest of preschoolers in them is not. They never get enough of taking a journey back in time to explore.
Dinosaur activities are an excellent theme for teaching and reinforcing their learning. With this style of themed learning, preschoolers can support their learning. They can easily use their imaginations to satisfy their curiosity and relive the times when these creatures walked on the earth millions of years ago.
If you’re looking to add dinosaur themes for your preschoolers or you need a guide to enrich your dinosaur activities for preschoolers, we’ve rounded up some incredible choices for you. Here are the top 15 dinosaur activities perfect for almost any preschooler.
List of Dinosaur Activities
1. Dinosaur Habitat
Source by: KIDS & GLITTER
Whether you call it a dinosaur garden or planet, creating a dinosaur habitat is a fantastic idea for an outdoor playground and classroom. Use simple natural materials with toy dinosaurs. For instance, you could put in plants that would be pretty conducive to withstand their imaginative play as preschoolers— preferably, plants with hard stems and strong roots too.
The dinosaur garden could be an addition to the school garden too. The good part is you don’t have to renovate it or change anything. It is universal enough to blend for even other theme learning activities. Moreover, life size tyrannosaurus footprint fossil for sale that you could get for your garden.
If you are looking to create something low-budget and cost-friendly, you could make use of a water table to create your Dinosaur Small World instead. It doesn’t affect the fun of building a playscape for the children.
2. Dinosaur Trivia
Source by: YouTube
Play games and answer random questions about dinosaurs. Get them to learn about the prehistorical times when they existed, their names, which dinosaurs were the leaf-eaters or meat-eaters, and every other fact about them.
3. Dinosaur Sensory Play
Source by: Happy Toddler Playtime
Fill a sensory bin with kinetic sand and plastic easter eggs for preschoolers to mould into dinosaur eggs and open to reveal which dinosaur is hidden in each egg.
4. DIY Dinosaur Foods
Source by: Holly and Heather
No dinosaur activity is complete without a dinosaur snack to feast on. Fiddle around with numerous dinosaur-themed foods, such as fossils with salt dough, dinosaur cakes, egg rice balls (as dinosaur eggs), ice cream with chocolate fossils, footprint cookies, chocolate chip cookies in dinosaur forms, fossil cookies, molten lava volcano cakes, fun treats, pasta skeletons, and popsicle stick dinosaurs.
Make these snacks to suit your unique style and that of the preschoolers. Educate them with it and let your stomachs do justice to it with relish.
5. Dinosaur Fine Motor skills and Brain Break Ideas
Source by: Homeschool Preschool
Dinosaurs are one of the excellent ways to introduce gross motor movement into the day! Regardless of how fast, slow, gigantic, small or which dinosaur flies, you can think of every possibility when it comes to dinosaurs and fine motor movements. Dinosaur movement activities for preschoolers are accurate for mixing with a dinosaur unit in the classroom.
Make movements fun with a dinosaur theme by setting a time and distance that works for the preschoolers. Ensure you perform activities long enough to get them moving. You can do as many as possible before taking a break.
Source by: Only Dinosaurs
The children should actively participate in dinosaur marching, stomping, jumping around the room, knee walking in giant steps, crawling, sidestepping, skipping, arm flaps (while walking), walking on their tiptoes, forward arm circles, backward arm circles, sidearm circles, shoulder blade squeezes.
Preschoolers should also do dinosaur dances and exercises (e.g. yoga) that’ll strengthen their movements.
6. DIY Dinosaur Crafts/Process Art Projects
Source by: Parenting Chaos
Dinosaur art activities for preschoolers can be created and employed to decorate the class, home, or school surroundings.
Some captivating sets of crafts for preschoolers include:
- egg hatching and hunting. Here, eggs are made with comfortable air-dry clay. When dry, they appear like ancient, fossilized rocks. Inside them, small dinosaurs are hidden, waiting to be excavated.
- volcanos with lava slime and making life-size footprints of dinosaurs (finding the suitable dinosaur footprint for the right dinosaur) with paper mache, even piggy banks or cases to save a few of their possessions in.
- paper dinosaurs, dinosaur puppets, and figurines that they can name after themselves.
- playdough volcanoes with lava slime (using glue, liquid starch, a small blob of red paint with a straw for the erupting volcano, and food coloring for a sensory experience.
- making life-size footprints out of paper, tape and chalk for preschoolers to place on the ground, jump on in the direction of the footprints and compare to their own foot size. They could also track the specific species of dinosaurs, and their unique characteristics, based on their footprints.
- painting with dinosaurs by dipping the feet of plastic dinosaurs into paint and creating tracks across the paper.
7. Dinosaur Puzzle Games
Source by: Dinosaur Puzzle Games
Puzzles could come in various patterns. Preschoolers could do some picture matching, where the teacher cuts pictures of dinosaurs in half, and the children will match together with the correct halves. Another type of puzzle is the magnetic tile dinosaurs, where preschoolers trace magnetic blocks/tiles into shapes of dinosaurs for preschoolers to match them into the correct forms.
8. Dinosaur Book Club/Form a Club
Source by: BookBairn
You can come up with a cool anthem to go with the club. Raise different dinosaur activities for preschoolers in the club. Activities like taking the chance to commemorate Dinosaur day on May 15, incorporating fun holidays, dinosaur parties and dino-theme week too. You can also celebrate a dino member’s birthday or infuse therapy sessions with dinosaur themes.
9. Dinosaur-themed Printables
Source by: The Artisan Life
There are free printables available for these sort of activities. They come in varieties. You can have them as props while reading dinosaur storybooks to the preschoolers in their circle time. You could also achieve playful learning with dinosaur letter and number tracing, dinosaur color matching printable activity, dinosaur Color Recognition printable, dinosaur sight words printables, and play dough printables. Every type of printable is fun either way.
10. The Paleontologist Way! (Excavation)
Source by: welovebeingmoms
Set up a dramatic stunt of a tent full of pretend fossils and small brushes to act out a paleontologist’s job. If not a play tent, then you could use sensory bins. You could also freeze small toy dinosaurs inside water balloons to create frozen eggs for preschoolers to melt with water.
11. Playing with Dinosaur Toys
Source by: KDVR
Preschoolers can build dinosaurs with shape cutouts and blocks. These things help preschoolers to troubleshoot difficulties quickly and enhance hand-eye coordination later on.
12. Dinosaur Literacy Activities
Source by: Pin
Preschoolers will learn alphabets through collections of dinosaur rhymes, reading dinosaur books, word search coloring pages, practicing letter formation in sand trays and matching of lower and uppercase letters.
13. Dinosaur Scientific Activities and Maths
Source by: Future Focused Learning Insights
You could immerse in a very fun scientific experiment with your preschoolers, like examining the weight of dinosaur tail and how they defend themselves from predators. Other alternatives comprise dinosaur number cards, dinosaur color matching/egg color matching and dinosaur number recognition worksheets. These activities enlighten preschoolers better about number recognition, counting, number sequencing and even place value!
14. Let's Play Dress up!
Source by: HuffPost UK
Dressing up like dinosaurs to imitate them hardly requires a lot of work or special materials. The slightest bit of prop, costume or accessory keeps them going and allows them to extend their “pretend play” better. Their imaginations can substitute for imperfections in the garbs.
Of course, if you want to be a “dinosaur family” with your kids, our realistic dinosaur suit is a great choice.
15. Dinosaur Movies
Source by: DeviantArt
Preschoolers can watch kid-friendly movies for their amusement. Movies like The Good Dinosaur or The Land Before Time or about Jurassic Park. There are platforms like Youtube, Amazon and PBS kids Disney+ to fascinate them with too.
Preschoolers are the same everywhere. They need all that is to learn to please their curious minds. This is why dinosaur activities are your go-to style for interactive thematic lesson plans. You can always count on them to get your preschoolers engrossed and entertained. Whatever the appeal, these activities offer tremendous benefits in the preschool classroom.
FAQs about Dinosaur Activities
Source by: INTEX
How Do You Teach Dinosaurs to Preschoolers?
Create a dinosaur skeleton model with your kids. Make copies of all of the bones and cut them out. Let your children put the bones together just as a paleontologist would. Let each child design their own dinosaur. Then, have them put together the dinosaur’s fossil with items to choose from- shells, leaves, bones, or plastic dinosaurs.
Where Can Kids Learn About Dinosaurs?
You can offer dinosaur-themed activities which are mentioned above for the kids. They will help the preschoolers to learn dinosaurs better.
