As an elementary school student I loved reading books about dinosaurs and I especially enjoyed a field trip to a local museum where we could look at fossils and touch fossil replicas. I also had a collection of plastic model dinosaurs. Recently, one of my friends mentioned in an email that his son is now into learning about dinosaurs. Reading that email prompted me to look for a few web-based games about Dinosaurs. Here are some of the better items that I found.

1. Discovery Channel’s Dinosaur Central has games, quizzes, puzzles, and a virtual prehistoric zoo. Students can also go back in time to see, displayed on a map, the dinosaurs that walked in different places of the earth.

2. Kids Dinos is a part of the Kids Know It Network. Kids Dinos offers elementary school students an easy-to-navigate and easy-to-understand database of dinosaur information. Students can learn the names of various dinosaurs through a flashcard game. Kids Dinos also offers students fun activities like “make your own dinosaur,” “dinosaur memory,” “dinosaur hangman,” or “dinosaur painter.”

3. The Dinosphere is a website hosted by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. In the Dinosphere students can choose from five games and activities including building a virtual dinosaur.

4. Scholastic offers students a dinosaur tour, a dinosaur picture book, and a “digging for dinosaurs” fact hunt. Scholastic offers teachers some lesson plans and research projects about dinosaurs.

5. National Geographic Kids has a few dinosaur themed games and displays including this dinosaur brain teaser game. On National Geographic Xpeditions teachers will find a handful of lesson plans like How Do Scientists Find Dinosaur Fossils? that can be used for teaching about dinosaurs in elementary school classrooms.

On the topic of dinosaurs, Snag Films offers National Geographic’s Dinosaur Hunters: Secrets of the Gobi Desert.