Have Roaring Fun with These Dinosaur Activities for Toddlers

Does your little one love dinosaurs

Do you want some fun activities that also help child’s development?

These awesome dinosaur Activities include Chalk Shadow Drawings for developing fine motor skills, Dinosaur Egg Matching Games for developing pre-maths skills, Dino Print Painting for early mark making skills, and a sensory Dinosaur Tuff Tray for small world play.

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Often Toy Dinosaurs are just not suitable for Toddlers but these Jumbo Dinosaurs are just fab as they are soft and the perfect size for little hands!

All of our activities include these Jumbo Soft and Safe Dinosaurs from Amazon.

Jumbo Soft & Safe Dinosaurs

If dinosaurs aren’t your toddlers thing (or if they are and you want more more more ideas!) then check out the ‘Book of Play’ a custom play book made just for you and your little one, packed full of ideas based on what they love, what you have, and what works for your family! Find all the details below:

Shadow Drawing Dinosaurs With Chalk

You can’t beat chalk play outside in the sun – it’s one of my absolute favourite things to do.

As these dinosaurs are a little bit chunkier, they are great for shadow drawings. Just position them for the longest shadow and let your toddler have a go at drawing around the shadow – this isn’t about perfect shadow drawing – it’s about:

Noticing how the shadows move – have fun and move the dinosaurs around – if you’re doing this activity inside then you could use a torch for light and move it around to make bigger and smaller shadows
Encouraging your child in mark-making activities such as drawing – again adapt this to your own setting, it doesn’t have to be with chalk, you could do this with crayons on a piece of cardboard inside
Developing those fine motor skills with chalk – for older children, you could try using smaller chalks rather than the big chunky chalks which are easier to graspFor more chalk play check out my blog post on Chalk Activities for Toddlers

Dinosaur Egg Matching Game

You might think that counting is the most important preschool skill to be aiming for, but in fact it is thought that matching and sorting activities are just as important as they help develop pre-maths skills, and lay a solid foundation for learning.

This activity is a really simple matching game using dinosaur ‘eggs’

I took a photo of each dinosaur and printed them off and folded each one up and placed in the eggs – when your child opens the egg they will then have to match the picture to the actual dinosaur.

You could expand this activity by hiding the eggs around the house / garden and finding them first – or you could pop them in a sand tray and dig them up

Dinosaur Print Painting

Printing with paints is such a fun activity for little ones, and when you’re using dinosaurs – well that’s another level of fun!

We chose to use just one colour for our Dino prints, but you could use a mixture of colours and walk all over the paper or you could draw a pencil path for the dinosaur to follow along making prints as they go.

You don’t have to use paints. You could use some ‘cocoa mud’ (which we’ll come to in just a moment) and make prints in the mud or roll out some play dough and push the dinosaur prints into the dough

Dinosaur Tuff Tray Ideas

This Tuff Tray was so much fun to put together and super simple too!

If your little one is mad on dinosaurs then they will love this Tuff Tray Idea

This Tuff Tray Play works well as both a sensory activity and as a small world play activity – and it’s a great tray to set up with the help of your little ones!

What we used:

Cut Grass – This is a great activity for little ones to practice using scissors – with great supervision!
(Another fab way to do this tray would be to actually grow grass in the tray itself – I have a blog post all about How to Grow Grass in a Tuff Tray and this is a great learning activity to do with your child – it should only take about a week to see results although the longer you leave it the more overgrown your grass would be for some fun hide and seek with dinosaurs!)
Twigs – This is a great opportunity to have a hunt around the garden and collect some sticks together to go into your tray
Pebbles – We used different sized pebbles to create an edge around our ‘mud’ tray and larger ones at the back to fill in the gaps around our plants to make them seem like one solid block of foliage
Plastic Tray – we used a black ready meal container filled with water to create a small pool in which the dinosaurs can play and get all that mud off! (Ours turned a lovely muddy shade of brown pretty quickly after some of the mud made it’s way in there!)
Cocoa ‘Mud’ – this is a really simple recipe using only 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of cocoa powder and 1/2 cup of water – it should make quite a dry but squish-able mud which is great for the dinosaurs to stomp around in and make prints – but simply add more water to the tray to make it a bit more slimy! (We found that it became wetter as we played anyway because if the pool)
Shallow tray – we used this to contain the mud – not that it really stayed in there! You don’t have to use a tray, the pebbles act as a mini barrier and it all gets mixed together in the end anyway!
Artificial plants – We used these to bulk out the back of the tray – you could use real plants of you wanted or any pretend play trees you might have