Dinosaurs fascinate almost everyone when they learn about how they roamed the Earth millions of years ago. The amount we’ve learned about dinosaurs through fossils is amazing, and there’s so many interesting facts you can share with your students while studying dinosaurs.
Since we don’t have any actual photos to study, just drawings and skeletons, dinosaurs are a great topic for students to use to work on their descriptive writing skills.
4 Writing Prompts for Elementary Students About Dinosaurs
Make the most of your lesson on dinosaurs by putting together a project for your students that involves a writing prompt. Talking about creatures that no one has ever seen in action automatically allows for the imagination to get to work and pushes students to flex their descriptive writing abilities when answering these prompts. Plus, you can add in a research element to the prompts and build those skills also.
In addition to practicing writing, a project like this presents the perfect opportunity to create a classbook. If you take the writing exercises and include a student drawing of the dinosaurs, you have what you need to create a prehistoric classbook!
Writing Prompt #1: You wake up one morning and discover a dinosaur is in your backyard. What kind of dinosaur did you find and what did you do with it?
How much fun will your students have thinking about which dinosaur they want to show up in their backyard? Such a large animal needs lots and lots of details in order to build a picture in the reader’s head. The second part of this prompt allows students to use their narrative writing skills to tell the reader what they did with the dinosaur. Help out your students by providing examples of good descriptive writing, and check out our blog for more information and writing prompts to help your students learn descriptive writing skills.
PROJECT IDEA
Ask your students to focus on what they see when they look out the window and a dinosaur is there. Have students describe it in vivid detail in their writing. Students should then complete their writing by telling what they did with the dinosaur. Have your students make drawings that represent that moment when they first saw the dinosaur, complete with the window frame included. The perspective will provide them with an interesting way to illustrate their final pieces. And what better way to capture these projects, than in a classbook that your students and their families can treasure.
Writing Prompt #2: Pick a dinosaur and write its biography. What characteristics was it known for? What kind of food did it eat? What time period did it live in?
While this might be geared more toward the upper elementary grade levels because it is based on research, you could consider this writing prompt if you feel your class could handle the concept and write a short dino-bio on a smaller scale.
The amount of research you require certainly can go up or down depending on the grade level you teach—from name, type of food they eat and how large for lower grade levels, to six or seven facts about the dinosaur as well as the origin of the name, for 4th and 5th graders.
PROJECT IDEA
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Give your students an outline that lists all of the details you’re looking for in their dinosaur biography. A dinosaur biography also deserves to have an awesome illustration to go along with it! Have your students look up pictures of their dinosaurs and have them create illustrations based on the examples they found. This little research project can easily be turned into a fun and informative classbook!
Writing Prompt #3: You traveled back in time and now live with the dinosaurs. How do you survive? Where do you live?
Although most kids will go straight to cave people ideas, this writing prompt should give you some very unique and entertaining answers. You might ask them to consider what their needs will be from water to food to shelter and how they might go about getting those things from nature.
It’s a great chance to wrap in some discussion of survival instinct and what we can and can’t do without. Students might be surprised what they can live without (or at least what they should be able to)!
PROJECT IDEA
Have your students use their critical thinking skills to write about how they would survive if they lived among these prehistoric creatures. Surviving life with dinosaurs means you need photographic proof, right? Have your students take a selfie with a plastic dinosaur in the class—probably with your phone—and then they can use the picture to create their drawing to complete this project. Time travel and selfies with dinosaurs certainly is something your class will want to remember, so why not create a classbook out of this project? You won’t regret it, and neither will your students when they see their published books.
Writing Prompt #4: What if Jurassic Park was created in our town? Would you go visit and what would the park be like? What dinosaurs would you want to see most and why?
Even if you won’t be able to turn on the Jurassic Park movies (both old and new), you easily could talk about it and show a few clips from the movies to give your students an idea of what it was like.
You can talk about how it would be similar to a zoo, but for dinosaurs, and that should help them understand the concept as well. Then it’s just a matter of letting their imaginations run wild!
PROJECT IDEA
Once your students finish writing about their amazing adventures in their own version of Jurassic Park and describe what they think the park would be like, then it’s time to add in an illustration of their parks. But instead of just one picture, show them the map from your local zoo that lists where all the animals are located. Ask them to draw their own Jurassic Park map that captures what they described in their pieces. Put the two parts together for each student, and you’ve got what you need to create one amazing classbook!
Additional resources
Our online teacher’s lounge is an excellent place for you to find more suggestions on way to improve your students’ writing.
Head over to sign up and receive a free classbook publishing kit so you’ll be able to make a special memory for your class.