Introduction
“Create your own dinosaur” is a fun and creative activity where the children put together a collage of 6 different dinosaurs. While they create their very own dinosaur, they learn to connect verbs to movements. The possibilities for new dinosaurs are endless because every child can come up with something completely unique.
Target group and Time
This activity is suitable for most children who have started learning English since the sentence structure is easy and they only have to find matching verbs to what their dinosaurs can do. Not understanding the words should not prevent the children from participating as each verb is visualized by movement. This activity can be used from 4th grade to 6th grade and should not last longer than 15-20 minutes in total.
Learning objectives
The teaching session’s learning objectives are matching verbs to actions and the respective dinosaur while acting them out and describing what their dinosaurs can do by using the vocabulary from the session. Put in simple words, this means that children jump when the matching verb for one of the dinosaurs is “jump” and can describe whether or not their own dinosaur can jump.
Instructions to set up the activity
The teacher provides pictures of dinosaurs (including their names) and under each picture needs to be a card with a verb that describes the movement they are known for.
- dig: Ankylosaurus
- fly: Pterodactyl
- jump: Velociraptor
- run: Tyrannosaurus Rex
- sprint: Ornithomimid
- swim: Spinosaurus
Once the dinosaurs as well as their matching verbs have been introduced by acting out the verbs, every student gets a task sheets, a pair of scissors, glue and pictures of every dinosaur (in this case: 6).
The next task is to cut out whatever body parts from the dinosaurs they choose and create their own. There are no rules whatsoever when it comes to creating, as they can completely ignore the original physique of the animals.
Once everyone is done creating their dinosaur, the next task is writing down what the dinosaurs can do. Following the pattern below, children write down sentences by observing which dinosaurs they used for body parts and what their new dinosaur can do.
“My dinosaur can…“
After that we have time for one last fun task where the children get to name their dinosaur.
If time still remains, children enjoy presenting their unique dinosaur to the rest of the group!
Letting it run
To include a multilingual approach to this game, it could be a fun idea to:
- Write down the English verbs onto the blackboard and act out the meanings.
- Let one or two children say the same verb in their first language ("jump" in Spanish is "saltar") and write down several words.
- Play the game again sometimes adding in a word from other languages. End the game with a round of English words.
The same “Create your own dinosaur” activity can also begin with black and white dinosaur coloring sheets or drawings. (Free dinosaur pages are available here.)
- Let the children colour in their dinosaur and give them the chance to be creative.
- End with a “Gallery Walk” where every child gets the chance to introduce their dinosaur if they want to. (If not, visitors can just appreciate the dinosaur art.)
