Dinosaurs activities for kids
Fossils, footprints, volcanoes and the dinosaurs themselves, for kids who know a stegosaurus from a triceratops.
12 activities in 4 formats. Each set has three, one per age band where the format allows.
Pretend Play
All pretend play · 3 activities
Arts & Crafts
All arts & crafts · 3 activities
Paper Crafts
All paper crafts · 3 activities
Indoor Builds
All indoor builds · 3 activities
Dinosaurs activities at home
Dinosaurs reward a particular kind of play — one that mixes physical drama with careful observation. A child who roars over a nest of hatching eggs in the Hatchling Nursery for Baby Dinosaurs needs something different from the one who wants to catalog bones and label specimens in the Natural History Museum Curator Setup. Between those two poles sit crafts that slow things down productively: Salt-Dough Fossil Impressions, for instance, asks a child to press, wait, and look closely at texture and form. The four formats here — pretend play, arts and crafts, paper crafts, and indoor builds — exist because dinosaur enthusiasm comes in different registers, and a good afternoon usually crosses two or three of them.
What is here
12 dinosaurs activities across four formats — pretend play, arts & crafts, paper crafts and indoor builds. One of them take twenty minutes or less, which is the number to look at when the day has already gone wrong. Every one of them makes at least a little mess, and the ones that do — Paleontologist Field Station and Dig Site, Salt-Dough Fossil Impressions and Cardboard Stegosaurus Relief Sculpture — say so on their card (some mess).
Making a dinosaurs of it
Start by looking at the age band on each card before the activity title, then check the help level, which tells you how closely you need to stay beside the child. A natural pairing for a longer afternoon is an indoor build first — something to construct and keep — followed by the pretend play that uses it. Get out your materials before you call the child over; cold glue guns, damp salt dough, and half-assembled cardboard all lose momentum during setup. If one activity runs long, most of the paper crafts here can pause mid-step and pick back up without losing anything.