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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
The time when preschool students aren’t fascinated by dinosaurs is the time when you should consider leaving the teaching profession. These ancient creatures hold sway over young minds for many reasons. For some, it’s their sheer size, for others it’s their ferocity (especially the meat eaters!) while still more enjoy the challenge of pronouncing the long scientific names. Whatever the reason, you’ll always drive up the engagement and the excitement in the classroom when you start your dinosaur theme, and this dino alphabet match should be at the heart of your literacy centers during this time.
Teaching Letter Identification
In your preschool classroom, students have to master a whole set of skills that will underpin the rest of their literacy journey throughout grade school. This incorporates things like learning sight words and learning vowel sounds, but one of the biggest skills is identifying capital letters and identifying lowercase letters. These letter recognition skills help students to sound out words and to recognize common words around the classroom such as their name and labels for classroom tools. The most common approach is to teach each letter by how frequently it appears in regular text, and this free alphabet printable for preschool gives you all 26 letters in one simple dinosaur worksheet for preschool. It works great as a final challenge once you’ve completed the alphabet, or you can use it as you complete a few letters at a time to practice the skills they’ve been learning.
Preparing Dinosaur Lunch Alphabet Munch
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Extension Dino Alphabet Match Activities
The basic concept of this dinosaur worksheet for preschool is simple. You cut up the letter cards, and students spend their center time identifying capital letters and identifying lowercase letters and use the recording sheet as they find matches. Your students will master this free alphabet printable for preschool pretty quickly, so try some of these extension tasks to keep the learning going:
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Play a scoot – any time you can introduce movement into your literacy centers, your students will love it. Instead of giving them a pile or bucket of the dinosaur letter cards, hide them around your room (or outside if the weather is nice) and have students practice finding and identifying lowercase letters.
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Make it a partner game – you can add a social skills element to your identifying capital letters literacy center. One player picks up a dinosaur letter card and says the letter out loud. The other marks it down on their free alphabet printable for preschool card and then compare answers with their partner.
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Practice writing – while this dino alphabet match is predominantly aimed at letter identification, you can turn it into a letter formation practice activity. As students find or pull each dinosaur letter cards, they should practice writing them down three times.
Like this? Then you’ll love my 10 Dinosaur Themed Literacy and Math Centers. These easy-prep games will get your students working on math, literacy and fine motor skills.
Games included:
1) Dinosaur Alphabet Writing Strips – with handwriting lines
2) Dinosaur CVC Ending Sounds – 40 different words included
3) Dinosaur Alphabet Clip Strips – place a clothespin/clip on the matching letters on the strip
4) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – pick a letter card then find and color it on the recording sheet
5) Dinosaur Playdough Color Words Mats – 8 different mats to use with playdough for forming the names of colors
6) Dinosaur School Race Spin and Graph – race to 10
7) Dinosaur Playdough Counting Mats to 10 – form the number and then fill up the ten frame with playdough ‘dinosaur eggs’
8) Dinosaur Number to Word Matching – number and word cards to 10 included
9) Dinosaur Egg Pattern Strips – use pompoms, dot markers, dot stickers or other colored manipulatives to complete the patterns. Includes ABAB, AABB, ABCABC and ABCB patterns
10) Dinosaur Eating Habits Sorting Mats – divide 18 food items into herbivore or carnivore mats
Check it out for more ready-to-go fun!
Fun Books About Dinosaurs:
Other Dinosaur Printables You’ll Love:
1) Dinosaur Printable Worksheets Pack – 50-page pack for your little one to practice letter recognition, writing, counting, graphing, tracing, coloring and so much more.
2) Dinosaur On The Run Tracing Lines – Improve fine motor skills and concentration at the same time. There are more than 10 different patterns to choose from.
3) Dinosaur Themed Literacy and Math Centers – 10 fun literacy and math games for preschool and kindergarten.
4) Dinosaur Shapes Roll and Graph Activity – Dice game to help with learning shapes and counting to 5.
5) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – Preschoolers will love pretending to be a paleontologist so grab this free printable game and start working on letter recognition.
Educational Tools For Your Classroom:
Browse My Most Popular Literacy Activites:
1) Valentines Alphabet Clip Strips – Kids will choose among 5 different letters on the strip to identify the matching ones.
2) Alphabet Beginning Sound Coloring Pages – Watch your child become more familiar with each letter of the alphabet as they practice coloring in the objects with that beginning sound.
3) Tommy Turkey’s Alphabet Pie – This turkey-themed letter recognition activity is so simple to prep and makes a great file folder game!
4) Pirate Alphabet Playdough Mats – Just print out the playing mats and ask your child to form the letters out using the playdough provided.
5) Farm Alphabet Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year!
6) Werewolf Spin and Cover – Kids will race to find all the letters on their mat this Halloween.
7) Bunny Burrows Game – Fun game for small groups or circle time where students will catch a bunny and say out the sound.
8) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – Dinosaur lovers will enjoy being a pretend paleontologist and finding all the letters.
9) Alphabet Handwriting Worksheets – Practice lowercase and capital letters with these print-and-go pages.
10) Rainy Day Alphabet – 1 printable, many ways to use.
