Introduction
“Create your own dinosaur” is a fun and creative activity where the children get to put together a collage of 6 different dinosaurs to create their very own, all while they learn to connect verbs to movements. The possibilities 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 will be 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 introduced dinosaur (in this case: 6)
Their 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 you can move on to the next task of writing down what your dinosaur 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 there is still some time left the children will enjoy presenting their unique dinosaur to the rest of the group!
