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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
It’s hard to pin down what makes dinosaurs so fascinating to preschool students. Maybe it’s the fact that they don’t exist any more, or maybe it’s that they feel magical and fantastical in nature, so the fact they were actually real makes the world a more interesting place. No matter what the reason, you’ll always find success with a prehistoric theme in your classroom, and you can add dinosaurs to just about every academic component of your day. This letter-saurus fossil digging alphabet activities for preschool will have your students excited about letter recognition as they become junior paleontologists for the day.
Bring Play Into Learning With This Dinosaur Letter ID Activity!
It’s common knowledge among preschool teachers that play is the best vehicle for any academic learning (a fact that sometimes gets lost in the upper grades). Playing activates all sorts of receptors in your students’ brains which makes any learning through play stick more than just repetition, though of course the more times a student practices a skill the more likely they are to retain it. This dinosaur letter ID activity brings the joy of dinosaurs together with some fun hands-on activities that will make your students feel like they’re playing first and foremost, with the letter recognition and naming skill as a side skill to work on.
Preparing Your Alphabet Activities for Preschool
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Print, laminate and cut apart the letter cards. Print out the coloring letter mat. Students will have fun matching the letter card to the letters on the dinosaur until the whole alphabet has been found. You can set up the letter cards around your classroom or in a sensory bin to transform this into a digging game for preschool.
Get Hands On With Letter-saurus Fossil Digging
Your students will love to color in the letter-saurus playing mat as they get ready to become fossil diggers. The basic activity is matching the letter card to the letter on the playing mat and coloring it as they “discover” each letter. You can make it a paired activity by having students take turns to read each letter out loud for their partner who colors it in. However, the play comes in as you turn this into a digging game for preschool, and these are some possible ways to bring play to this dinosaur letter ID activity:
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Bury the letters – the most obvious digging game for preschool is to hide all the letters in your sandpit and give your students miniature shovels and brushes to “dig” up the letter cards. Be sure to laminate the letter cards so that multiple groups can do this activity as it will quickly become a firm favorite. You should also buy some small plastic dinosaurs for a surprise find as they’re working.
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Create a treasure hunt – another way to help students play is to hide the letter cards around a specific area (e.g. your classroom or the outdoor learning area). You can then either let your students run wild and find the cards as quickly as possible, or give them clues that will lead them to groups of cards hidden together.
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Jump for letters – finally, you can add an active component to their learning by hanging the letter cards on a string and have the students jump to retrieve them. You’ll likely need to have multiple strings to accommodate the height and athletic differences in your classroom, but they’ll enjoy the satisfaction of getting each of the letter cards.
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.
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