Introduction

“Create your own dinosaur” is a fun und 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 seem endless as every child has 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. Therefore I’d say this activity can be used from 4th grade to 6th grade and adapt the difficulty level and should not last longer than 15-20 minutes in total.

Learning objectives

For 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 same vocabulary we have been using in that session.

e.g.: the 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 (include 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 bodypart of the dinosaurs of their choice and create their own. There are no rules whatsoever when it comes to the creative part as they can completely ignore the 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. You will find an unfinished sentence on the task sheet and let the children fill out the rest by observing which dinosaurs they used and what they 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!