Awesome Dinosaur Activities For Kids

Want to make learning about prehistoric creatures unforgettable for your students? These hands-on dinosaur activities will transform your classroom into an exciting world of exploration, discovery, and fun! If you're looking for a fun way to engage your students in a hands-on, dinosaur theme learning unit, you'll love these dinosaur activities for kids!  

Dinosaur Activities For Kids

No creature that ever roamed the Earth is more thrilling than the prehistoric dinosaur! Ever since Jurassic Park, small and big kids everywhere have been fascinated by these massive animals and they are the perfect subject to integrate literacy, math and science. Here are a few ways you can teach kids about dinosaurs:

1. Read books about dinosaurs
2. Go on a dinosaur dig for bones
3. Make your own dinosaur fossils
4. Measure and weigh dinosaur eggs
5. Build a giant dinosaur skeleton
6. Create a dinosaur habitt
7. Research and write about dinosaurs

Let's take a closer look at each of these dinosaur activities and how you can do them in your classroom:

Building Background 

Before diving into the subject of dinosaurs, it's important to build some background knowledge about different types of dinosaurs. The first thing to do is start by reading some favorite dinosaur books to your students. Great choices include You Can Be A Paleontologist by Scott Sampson and What Are Dinosaurs? by Bobbie Kalman.

During your read-alouds, encourage discussions by asking questions like:

• Which dinosaur was the biggest?

• How many dinosaur names can we learn?

• What did dinosaurs eat?

• Which dinosaur had a long neck?

• Have you ever seen a dinosaur skeleton?

• Did all dinosaurs have sharp teeth?

• Did we learn about a bird-like dinosaur?

These discussions help children develop communication skills while learning about dinosaurs and their importance. 

Dinosaur Dig: A Hands-On Exploration

Now it's time for your students to become little paleontologists! Tell them they will be searching for dinosaur bones and dinosaur fossils to create their own classroom museum. In my class, we worked together to create this list of things we might find in a museum about dinosaurs.

Making Dinosaur Fossils

 Another fun dinosaur activity that we did was creating our own fossils. This easy dinosaur craft requires only a few simple materials:

• Salt dough (made with an easy recipe using flour, salt, and water)

• Dinosaur toys (to make imprints)

To make things easier I prepared the salt dough ahead of time and put a small ball of dough into a ziplock for each child. Be sure to keep your salt dough in an air tight container so that it doesn't dry out before you use it. Give each student their ball of dough and some small dinosaurs. Have them press their little dinosaurs into the salt dough to create dinosaur footprints and fossil imprints. Let them dry, then paint them in different colors for added dinosaur fun. You can even have students compare their fossils to real dinosaur skeletons they’ve seen in books or videos.

When our fossils were dry we added them to our dinosaur museum, which we set up in our hallway. 

Discovering Dinosaur Eggs

This is a great unit to do some fun math activities and dinosaur science experiments. I hid these dinosaur eggs all over the playground and my little paleontologists were excited to search for their own eggs. We brought the eggs back to our room and it was time to learn more about our dinosaur eggs. Each student had the opportunity to weigh their egg and measure the length.

They wrote their findings on this dinosaur egg observation sheet and when they were finished they put their eggs in a cup of water to “hatch”. We observed our eggs over the course of the day to see what kind of toy dinosaurs were in each egg. The kids absolutely loved this and were so excited to have their own baby dinosaur. 

Building a Giant Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton

A great way to get students moving and learn more about what dinosaurs looked like is by building a giant T_Rex skeleton. Have students work together to cut out dinosaur bones from construction paper or you can  cut them out ahead of time and hide them around your room for kids to find. In my classroom, we used a large sheet of black butcher paper to assemble our dinosaur. We sat together in our hallway and each child got a chance to help build our T Rex. 

Once complete, we worked together to label the different parts and display our dinosaur in our museum! 

Create a Dinosaur Habitat

No dinosaur unit is complete without creating aa dinosaur habitat!

Have students use construction paper and craft materials to build a small world habitat featuring:

• Trees, volcanoes, and rocks

• Dinosaur track pathways

• Waterfalls and ponds

Add small rocks, plants and mini plastic dinosaurs to your habitat for students to have with with as they play and learn more about the age of the dinosaurs. 

This dramatic play area encourages pretend play and is a huge hit with children of all ages!

Research and Write About Dinosaurs

Now that your young learners have some good background knowledge, it's time for them to research their dinosaurs and write a dinosaur report.  My class worked together to complete this large anchor chart about dinosaurs including where they lived, what they ate, and what they looked like. We added lots of small details about dinosaurs to our chart. 

Save These Dinosaur Activities For Elementary Students

Take a minute to save these ideas to your favorite dinosaur activities Pinterest board so you can remember them later!