Dinosaur Pattern Block Mats: Hands-On Math Activity

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Do you have a dinosaur lover at your house? These Dinosaur Pattern Block Mats combine two kid favorites—dinosaurs and hands-on building!

Pattern blocks are a wonderful way for kids to explore shapes, spatial reasoning, symmetry, and early geometry. With these printable dinosaur designs, kids can use colorful pattern blocks to build some of their favorite prehistoric creatures.

The set includes 9 different dinosaurs, with 3 versions of each design—that’s 27 dinosaur mats altogether! The different versions allow kids to start with more visual support and work up to creating the dinosaur design more independently.

Dinosaur Pattern Block Mats

This printable set includes pattern block designs for 9 different dinosaurs:

• Ankylosaurus
• Apatosaurus
• Brachiosaurus
• Parasaurolophus
• Spinosaurus
• Stegosaurus
• Triceratops
• Tyrannosaurus Rex
• Velociraptor

Each dinosaur comes in three different versions:

Full Color: Kids can match their pattern blocks directly to the colored shapes on the mat.

Shape Outlines: The dinosaur is white, but the individual pattern block shapes are shown, giving kids a guide for where each piece belongs.

Blank Silhouette: For an extra challenge, kids get the dinosaur shape without the individual block outlines and have to figure out how to fill the space themselves.

This makes it easy to adjust the activity for different ages and skill levels—or let children progress from the more guided version to the open-ended challenge.

Print the dinosaur mats and use them with standard pattern blocks. You can laminate the pages or place them in dry-erase pockets if you plan to use them repeatedly in a classroom, homeschool, or math center.

These printable Dinosaur Pattern Block Mats are available in my shop.

Learning with Pattern Blocks

Pattern blocks may look like simple toys, but kids are practicing quite a few important math skills while they build.

As children work with the dinosaur designs, they can practice:

• Shape recognition
• Spatial reasoning
• Visual discrimination
• Geometry
• Symmetry
• Fine motor skills
• Problem solving
• Creating larger shapes from smaller shapes

Encourage kids to name the shapes as they work. How many triangles did they use? Which shapes fit together to make a hexagon? Can they find two different ways to fill the same space?

Those little observations help turn pattern-block play into meaningful hands-on math.

Dinosaur Math Activities

There are lots of ways to extend the learning beyond simply completing the mats.

Have kids count and graph the pattern blocks used to build each dinosaur. Which dinosaur uses the most pieces? Which uses the fewest?

You could also sort the pieces by shape, compare two dinosaurs, make a tally chart, or calculate how many of each shape were used.

For an extra challenge, let kids design their own pattern block dinosaur. They can build it first and then trace or draw the shapes onto paper to record their design.

Older children can even explore fractions with their creations. If a dinosaur uses 20 pattern blocks and 5 are triangles, what fraction of its pieces are triangles?

More Dinosaur Activities for Kids

If your kids love dinosaurs, you can keep the dinosaur theme going with some of my other hands-on dinosaur activities.

• Dinosaur Play Dough Mats
• Dinosaur Activities for Kids (Printable Puzzles & Matching Game)
• Front and Back Dinosaur Flip Book
• Dinosaur Counting Puzzles (Free Printable Fossil Math Activity)

More Pattern Block Activities

Love learning with pattern blocks? I have several other themed pattern block sets you can use throughout the year, including:

• Ocean Animal Pattern Block Mats for Kids
• Easter Pattern Block Mats
• Farm Animal Pattern Block Cards
• St. Patrick’s Day Pattern Block Mats
• Christmas Pattern Block Mats
• New Year Pattern Block Mats

Great for preschoolers, kindergartners, and on up, pattern blocks are an easy way to add hands-on geometry and problem solving to almost any theme. Keep a container of blocks nearby and switch out the mats as your studies and seasons change!