Show children pictures of various fossils and skeletons so they can see the variety of bones dinosaurs had. Give each child a paper towel tube and some sheets of newspaper. Help children crumple the paper into balls and tape them to the ends of the tubes to make bones. Tear more paper into strips and mix up equal parts glue and water. Show children how to run the strips through the glue and cover the bones with them. When the strips harden, have children paint their papier mache bones.
When teaching preschoolers about dinosaurs, introduce new vocabulary over a series of days. Children won't know words like paleontologist, extinct, carnivore and herbivore, and they won't be able to memorize all these words at once. Choose a word of the day during the time that you're studying dinosaurs. Each morning, explain what the word means and show the written word to children. Pass out magazines and newspapers and ask children to cut out individual letters to make up the word. Once they've glued the letters onto paper, children can add illustrations.
Once children have learned about the basic types of dinosaurs, teach them more about the different physical features and characteristics of different dinosaurs. Encourage children to use what they learn to invent their own dinosaurs. Ask each child to first draw her dinosaur and make up a name for it. Once they've designed their creatures, ask children to decide where their dinosaur would live and what it would eat. Gather children in a circle and let each child present her dinosaur to the class.
Gather some library books or do online research to find out where in the world various dinosaurs roamed. Spread out a large world map and cut out pictures of each dinosaur. Hold up the dinosaurs one at a time and tell children what country it used to live in. Write out the name for children to look at and ask them to search the map to see if they can find it. Tape each dinosaur to the map and talk about which dinosaurs lived closest to your area.