The A-Z of Dinosaurs

By | February 27th, 2009|Educational Activities, Everything Dinosaur News and Updates, Main Page|4 Comments

A Dinosaur Alphabet – From Ankylosaurus to Zuniceratops

Science and palaeontology have changed a lot since the naming of the first dinosaur (Megalosaurus – 1824), but people’s fascination with these remarkable creatures has not.  It seems that the more fossils we find the greater the number of questions that we have about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals from the past.

Dinosaurs Alphabet

Children seem to be captivated by them and we are often told by proud parents that their child knows more about dinosaurs then anything else.  Some of these children are very young so we thought it would be a good idea to put our teaching skills to good use and create some learning materials to help children get to grips with the alphabet and numbers.  We have a number of products already aimed at helping children learn, combining their love of dinosaurs with creative play and cognitive development.  One such example is the wooden counting dinosaurs set.

This product combines a jigsaw concept where children can learn to recognise numbers with pictures of dinosaurs that can help them to grasp the concept of numeracy.  It is a great product and one that always performed well when put in a focus group for testing.

The Wooden Dinosaur Counting Set

Dinosaurs by Numbers.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

To view the range of dinosaur and prehistoric animal themed gifts available from Everything Dinosaur: Dinosaur Toys and Gifts.

Inspired by Teachers

Inspired by comments from teachers, we are currently in the process of designing a Dinosaur Alphabet – the joke around the office is that we can handle the dinosaurs but learning the alphabet is a different matter.  We have twenty-six dinosaur cards, each one represents a letter in the alphabet.  They show a dinosaur beginning with the letter, a scale drawing, pronunciation and the letters themselves to help young learners recognise and remember them.

It has been fun to make and includes lots of popular dinosaurs such as Carnotaurus, Stegosaurus and of course Tyrannosaurus rex, as well as some more unusual ones to represent letters such as X and J.  We have had to take a little bit of licence with the letters H and Q, using marine reptiles and the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus.  We could have commissioned drawings for dinosaurs such as Hadrosaurus and Qantassaurus, but instead we have opted to broaden the type of animals used in this series.

Our new dinosaur alphabet will now go forward into our testing programme and should be available as a download shortly.

From Ankylosaurus to Zuniceratops an Illustration from the Dinosaur Alphabet

An A-Z of the Dinosauria.  Helping young dinosaur fans to learn the alphabet.  A dinosaurs alphabet. Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur (Zuniceratops)

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