Dinosaur Information for Preschool Children
- Begin with the concept of size. Explain to the preschooler that dinosaurs were much bigger than human beings. Give examples of a few tall buildings in your area to help the child visualize the meaning of "big." Tell him that dinosaurs lived a long time ago, even before any human beings lived. Explain that people have found very old bones in the ground that led them to this discovery.
- Explain to a preschooler that some dinosaurs ate grass and plants, while others ate the meat of other animals. Have your child place a flower inside a book and place a heavy object on the book. Examine the flower after a few days and show her the dried remains. Explain that a similar thing happens when animal parts are trapped in the soil or tree trunks, and introduce the term "fossils." Tell the child that we know dinosaurs lived, and have an idea of what they may have looked like, only because we found fossils pressed into rocks.
- Collect a few dinosaur pictures, stencils, tracing paper and plain sheets of paper. Help the child trace the dinosaur picture using the tracing paper or the stencil. Get him to color a few pictures using crayons, and glue sand onto a few pictures to create a textured image. Use these activities to point out differences between one dinosaur and another and link these up with other information. For example, if you have a picture of a herbivorous dinosaur and a carnivorous one, point out the differences in the teeth and explain why they are different in size and shape. Explain that dinosaurs needed a different kind of teeth to chew meat than to chew plants.
- Preschoolers love acting things out, and role play is a good way of helping them understand concepts that sound vague in words. For example, have the child enact being inside a dinosaur egg by curling up very tight. Ask her to move around when still curled to explain wriggling movements. Follow this with gradually raising her head, then her hands and stretching to mimic the birth and growth of dinosaurs. Hide a few "bones" in a sandbox and have the child act like an explorer or archeologist, using tweezers to remove the bones and paintbrushes to clean them, so she can better understand how people found dinosaur remains.
