Dinosaurs and fossils word bank for KS1 and KS2

Dinosaurs are one of the few topics that children bring their own vocabulary to. Many five-year-olds can name a dozen species, and that enthusiasm is a gift for word work. Litsee’s curriculum data links the topic to two science statements: Year 3, on how fossils form when living things are trapped within rock, and Year 6, on how fossils show that living things have changed over time. The KS1 mat is for wonder and description; the KS2 mat is for the science.

Young children love sorting dinosaurs, and sorting is where the topic words come in. Herbivore and carnivore are the first pair to teach: plant-eaters and meat-eaters. Look at teeth in pictures or models: flat teeth for grinding plants, sharp ones for meat. Then sort toy dinosaurs into two hoops and ask children to say why, using the word.

The adjectives on the KS1 mat are for comparing: enormous and tiny, spiky and smooth, heavy and gentle. A “guess my dinosaur” game, where one child describes and the others guess, builds sentences quickly. Footprint and stomp make a good link to maths, too: measure a giant footprint in the playground and see how many children fit inside it.

The Year 3 statement is a sequence, so teach it as one. A living thing dies and is buried quickly in sediment such as mud or sand. Over a very long time, more layers build up on top and harden into rock. Minerals slowly replace the hard parts, such as bones and shells, and turn them into stone. Much later, the rock wears away and the fossil is found. Pupils can act this out with layers of sand and plaster, then write the process as an explanation text using the verbs on the mat: preserve, fossilise, excavate.

Mary Anning is the perfect person to bring into this part of the topic. Working on the beaches of Lyme Regis in Dorset in the early 1800s, she found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton to be recognised, with her brother Joseph, and later important plesiosaur fossils. She had little schooling and was not admitted to the scientific societies of her day, yet her finds changed what scientists understood about the past. Her story is a strong context for a biography or a diary entry.

Three misconceptions come up every year. People and dinosaurs never lived at the same time; the last non-bird dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago, long before humans. Not every prehistoric reptile was a dinosaur: flying pterosaurs and swimming plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were relatives, not dinosaurs. And birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs, which brings the Year 6 statement on evolution to life. A pigeon in the playground is the closest thing to a dinosaur most children will ever see.

A time-window story, in which a fossil found on a beach opens a window onto the age of the dinosaurs, is a good model for pupils’ own writing, because they let a modern character notice and describe a prehistoric world using precise words. KS2 pupils can also write a museum label for a fossil they have made, using a specimen name, an era and one piece of evidence.