Have you ever used a dinosaur theme during speech sessions? Dinosaur speech therapy activities are honestly so much fun. It is a theme that can work at most anytime of the year and younger students are usually pretty engaged with the dinosaur topic. Check out 10 fun dinosaur activities for speech therapy!
I linked all of my favorite activities for a dinosaur theme below and some are Amazon affiliate links. This does not mean that you pay anymore for the Amazon items, it simply means that I make a small commission off of researching it for you. Thanks for supporting The Speech Room News website so I can continue to write free articles.
What Can Kids Learn from Dinosaurs?
First and foremost, you might choose a dinosaur unit for student engagement. That doesn’t have to be the only reason though. When you use a dinosaur unit, students will learn all about earth, life and the natural world. It will also hopefully teach students to always be investigating and exploring how the world works.
How Do You Introduce a Dinosaur Topic?
Every time you begin a new theme, it’s really important to give students some background knowledge on the topic. Can you already guess the best way to do this? Reading some dinosaur themed books of course!
Check out these dinosaur themed books to use in Speech Therapy:
I Am a Dinosaur by: Rebecca and James McDonald
Students will learn current scientific facts about dinosaurs, while telling the story of the different stages of life that many dinosaurs lived.
How To Catch a Dinosaur by: Adam Wallace and Andy Elkerton
Can students prove that dinosaurs still walk amongst us by catching one?
What Was the Age of the Dinosaurs? by: Megan Stine
Students will travel back in time when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth for a better understanding of them.
Here We Go Digging for Dinosaur Bones by: Susan Lendroth
This story is set to the tune of “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush.” Students will be pretend paleontologists and go digging for fossils. This is a fun story to follow-up with a sensory bin of dinosaur bones.
Digging Up Dinosaur Bones by: Aliki
This books discusses how dinosaurs lived thousands of years ago and no one knew they ever existed for the longest time. Then people begin finding fossils and bones and putting dinosaur skeletons in museums.
Chalk by Bill Thomson
This Wordless Picture Book is so fun! It’s great paired with a nonfiction text to tap into the imagination side of dino play. (If you’re new to Wordless Picture Books try these articles on EBP, Evals, and a huge list.)
One of my favorite, print and go, book companions is for Chalk! It has tons and tons of goals covered and all you need is the book. Download it for therapy today!
Check out 10 FUN Dinosaur Activities for Speech Therapy:
Once your students have some background knowledge on dinosaurs, start incorporating some of these fun-filled dinosaur activities into speech therapy.
1. Dot & Go Dinosaur Articulation and Phonology
This dinosaur dot and go is great for practice of articulation or phonology skills. All you need are some bingo daubers to put with the printed sheets and you are all set! There is also a Google Slides version you can use if you wish. Kids really love these.
2. Dough & Data with Dinosaurs
Grab some small containers of play-doh and pass them out to your students with the pre-made play-doh mats and watch students create! I am always able to grab a ton of data during this activity because students are building, creating and very engaged. All of the shapes are made from long skinny rolls so even students that have some fine motor trouble can do them fairly easily. Just grab the clinician probe that matches the dinosaur mat your student is working with! You can use for progress monitoring or baseline data.
3. Feed the Dinosaur Articulation Game
Feed the Dinosaur is a fun Boom Card game in which the dinosaur eats 10 tasty speech words on each card. The dinosaur even makes a chomping sound as he eats! You may even just want to use the language pages out of this set if you have older students. These discuss different prehistoric vocabulary about dinosaurs.
4. Color & Play Dinosaur Bingo
Bingo is always an easy to prep game that students love. Color and Play Dinosaur Bingo makes targeting vocabulary related to dinosaurs easy.
5. Dinosaur Sensory Bin
If you have been following me for awhile, you know that I love a good sensory bin to go with a themed unit. A dinosaur theme in speech therapy is no exception.
Grab this Dino XCavate Kit and throw everything in a large plastic tub. Each kit is made up of kinetic sand with dinosaur bones. The kinetic sand is the color of real dirt and even comes with a small shovel.
There are tons of opportunities for sporadic language during sensory play. Plus, I like to sneak in some data without my students even realizing it while they are engaged!
6. Dinosaur Wind-Up Toys
To continue with these dinosaur speech activities, grab some simple dinosaur wind-up toys to add to your collection. I use these in a few different ways.
I keep a few in my evaluation bin as a motivation for students to earn! Another activity that I like to do to help encourage articulation practice and speech sounds are to pretend we are dinosaurs and try to SOUND like dinosaurs.
This might look like saying ROAR or even having students “SHOUT” different dinosaur vocabulary LOUDLY like a dinosaur would.
In addition, you could add these wind-up toys to the sensory dinosaur activity bin that you created above!
7. Go Fish: Dino Edition
A great language activity to play is Go Fish so why not play the Dino edition?
8. Jurassic Life: Dinosaur App for Kids
In this Archaeologist Game, kids get to dig for dinosaur bones and put them together in a puzzle. This is a nice game to use in a 1:1 setting or if you have a group of 2 students, you can have one student play while the other works with you and then switch.
9. Dinosaur Game: Snakes & Ladders
Games are always fun to add to a themed unit and a great way to incorporate social skills practice. Students will use their language and counting skills as they maneuver dinosaur tracks and slide down lava flows.
10. Dinosaur Sorting
Grab this super fun Dinosaur Sorting Game from Amazon. The large T-Rex Dinosaur “chomps” the smaller dinosaurs. Students can pick up the small dinosaurs this way and put them into the correct color dinosaur egg. This activity would be really great to use in conjunction with an occupational therapist if you are doing cotreatments.
More Dinosaur Activities for Speech Therapy:
Dino-rific: Dinosaurs in Speech Therapy
Wordless Picture Books: Chalk by Bill Thomson
These fun dinosaur speech therapy activities are perfect for preschool through second grade. Your students will have so much fun with the dinosaur theme in speech!
Tell me-what dinosaur activities do you love to use in speech and language therapy?
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