Helpful Tips for Parents

• Read aloud daily for at least 15 minutes. This single habit is the strongest predictor of kindergarten reading readiness and long-term academic success.

• Answer "why" questions fully and honestly. A child who gets real answers to their questions develops deeper curiosity than one whose questions are dismissed or oversimplified.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I support a gifted preschooler who seems to need more than peers?

Gifted preschoolers benefit from depth rather than acceleration — instead of teaching next-year's content, provide deeper engagement with current concepts. A preschooler fascinated by numbers doesn't need grade-school arithmetic; they benefit from mathematical puzzles, spatial reasoning challenges, and mathematical exploration at their own depth. Social-emotional support is equally important: gifted preschoolers often have asynchronous development (advanced intellectually but emotionally typical for their age) and need appropriate peer interaction alongside intellectual challenge.

Related reading: See also our vocabulary building guide and our counting activities for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🤔 Critical Thinking — Being asked "why do you think that?" and forming and defending an answer develops the analytical reasoning children need for reading comprehension, mathematics, and evidence-based argumentation.
• ✏️ Pre-Writing Development — Drawing, tracing, and early mark-making develop the fine motor control and visual-motor integration that handwriting requires — making every drawing activity a contribution to writing readiness.
• 📖 Story Structure Understanding — Understanding that stories have a beginning, problem, solution, and ending develops narrative comprehension — the mental schema children use to make sense of increasingly complex texts throughout their school years.
• 📚 Pre-Reading Skills — Activities that involve letters, sounds, rhymes, and print directly build the phonological awareness and letter knowledge that are the two strongest predictors of successful reading development.

Dinosaur Circle Time

Talk about what a fossil is. Have the children feel a small rock or a fossil sample if you can find one and discus how we learn about dinosaurs through the fossils that we have found.

Talk about meat eaters and plant eaters. Ask the preschoolers which type of dinosaur probably had sharp teeth?

Dinosaur Arts and Crafts

Make Dinosaur rubbings from purchased plastic molds or make them yourself by tracing a pattern on a piece of cardboard and going over it with glue.

Make a dinosaur fossil by stamping a dinosaur shape into home-made or purchased dough. It is best to use a dough recipe that can be baked and hardened to show children that fossils are hard like rocks. This activity can also be done with leaves or pieces of pasta.

Print out a picture of a dinosaur. Give the preschoolers dried white beans and have them blue them where the bones would be on the dinosaur.

Print out a picture of a dinosaur. Have the preschoolers trace the dinosaur with glue. Cover the glue with sand and gently shake the excess off. Allow the glue to dry.

Cut a dinosaur egg out of coffee filters. Use watered-down paint to decorate them.

Marble paint on any color paper. Let it dry. Cut the paper into an egg shape to make a dinosaur egg.

Dinosaur Math and Science

Fill Dinosaur Eggs (plastic Easter eggs) with items of different weight. Have the preschoolers put them in order from lightest to heaviest.

Go on a fossil hunt. Give each preschooler a magnifying glass and a container to hold rocks. Take them outside and have them collect rocks. Once inside, have the preschoolers look at each rock with the magnifying glass. Are any of the rocks fossils?

Be a dinosaur scientist. Fill the sand table with dinosaur toys and have each preschooler use a paint brush to find the dinosaurs in the sand. Talk about why scientists use brushes to find bones rather than digging with tools that could damage the bones.

Freeze small dinosaur toys in a small cup of water. Give each child a spoon or other blunt object to chisel away and help dig out the dinosaur bones.

Make chocolate chip cookies. Talk about what a paleontologist is. Give each preschooler a toothpick to pick the chocolate chips out of the cookie.

Put toy dinosaurs inside a balloon. Blow the balloon up and cover in paper mache. Allow the dinosaur egg to dry and then paint the outside. Have the preschoolers dictate a story about their dinosaur egg and draw a picture of the dinosaur's mother.

Put a handful of toy dinosaurs inside a plastic bag. Have the preschoolers estimate how many dinosaurs are inside.

Talk about how big a dinosaur was. A brontosaurus was 75 feet long and had a foot the size of a page from the newspaper. Measure a 75 foot long piece of string and take the children outside to see how long it is. Draw a dinosaur footprint on a piece of newspaper (the full page opened up) and have the preschoolers stand inside of it.

Have children build volcanoes in the sand table. Scoop out a space at the top of the volcano and fill it with baking soda and vinegar. Watch the volcano erupt.

Preschool Plant Activity - What Happened to the Dinosaurs?

Does your preschooler love dinosaurs, but doesn't understand why they're not around anymore? Or are you looking for a preschool plant activity to explain why plants need the sunlight? With this fun and easy preschool plant activity, your preschooler will understand how the dinosaurs died out and the importance of sunlight to plants.

Dinosaur Music and Movement

Play dinosaur tag. One child is the T-Rex and the others are all plant eaters. The T-Rex tags the plant eaters. When the plant eaters are tagged they must sit down.

• Tie paper lunch bags to children's feet with a piece of yarn. Let the preschoolers stomp around like dinosaurs or dance to music.

Dinosaur Pretend Play

Fill dinosaur eggs (plastic Easter eggs) with small dinosaur toys. Let children pretend to help the dinosaurs hatch out of the eggs.

Fill the sand table with dinosaur eggs. Allow the preschoolers to find dinosaur nests.

Fill the bean table with toy dinosaurs.

Dinosaur Books

T is for Terrible" target="_blank">T Is for Terrible by Peter McCarty

Ten Terrible Dinosaurs" target="_blank">Ten Terrible Dinosaurs by Paul Stickland

The Day of the Dinosaur" target="_blank">The Day of the Dinosaur by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Hi! I'm Rachel Lister, the Preschool Education writer at PreschoolRock.com. I live in Utah with my husband and two beautiful boys. When my oldest son was born, I quit my teaching job and opened a home daycare and preschool. I love to help preschoolers learn about the world around them. They make life interesting and I can't imagine doing anything different. If you have any ideas, suggestions or comments, feel free to contact me.