Dinosaurs and Fossils Matching Binder

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 19 pages, 113 type-in fields

• A Dinosaur and Fossil Items Request board: three request slots (I see, I want, This is a) and a seven-picture match — with its own 7 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• A Dinosaur or Fossil-Dig Item Sort board: two sort slots and two picture-match grids (dinosaurs; fossil-dig items) — with its own 7 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• Both boards twice: a full-color set for a laminated binder and a black-and-white ink-saver set for the photocopier
• 21 cut-apart picture cards in all, counting the color set and the home page once
• A weekly tracker: 8 board jobs down, Monday to Friday across, one letter per cell (no help / pointed once / said the words / not run), a "no help" count per row and a week total
• A binder organizer: a front cover, a spine strip and nine divider tabs (three of them blank)
• A home version: a smaller-scale version of the same request-and-sort cards (7 cards) for the kitchen table, with a seven-day "we did it" row
• A family update with a team hand-off block for the next adult who runs the binder
• A phrase bank: 25 lines in 6 groups (spoken lines for running the boards, written starters for the note afterward)
• A filled example — an invented student, one week, every count re-counted from its own row
• An answer key listing every board, the cards it takes and what correct looks like, plus the full word list (classroom set and home set)
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

A dinosaurs-and-fossils vocabulary binder built on one seven-word bank — T-Rex, Sauropod, egg, volcano, bone, footprints, rock — run through two different boards: naming and requesting any of the seven at the first board, then sorting the same seven into dinosaurs versus fossil-dig items at the second, each with its own tracker row. Only two of the seven words are actual dinosaur species (T-Rex, Sauropod); the other five are fossil-dig-scene items (an egg, a volcano, a bone, footprints, a rock) — the sort board makes that split the explicit subject of its own page rather than folding five non-dinosaur pictures quietly into a "dinosaur" theme. Most matching binders stop at the board; this one adds the tracker, the family update and the phrase bank behind it, so a week of practice turns into counts a case manager can bring to a meeting.

The Boards

• Dinosaur and Fossil Items Request (page 6 in color, page 7 in ink-saver) — the board stays whole above a cut line; the card band below cuts apart. Three slots for requesting phrases (I see, I want, This is a), and a seven-picture match (T-Rex, Sauropod, egg, volcano, bone, footprints, rock): the child matches the identical card onto its picture.
• Dinosaur or Fossil-Dig Item Sort (page 9 in color, page 10 in ink-saver) — two sort slots (This is a dinosaur, This is a fossil-dig item), and two picture-match grids: a two-picture Dinosaurs grid (T-Rex, Sauropod) and a five-picture Fossil-Dig Items grid (egg, volcano, bone, footprints, rock) — the same seven words, sorted honestly by what they actually are.

The Words

• Dinosaur and fossil items request cards (7): T-Rex, Sauropod, egg, volcano, bone, footprints, rock
• Dinosaur sort cards (2): T-Rex, Sauropod
• Fossil-dig item sort cards (5): egg, volcano, bone, footprints, rock
• Home page — the sort board's two groups at full size: 2 dinosaur cards, 5 fossil-dig-item cards

Every picture was chosen to be named in one word by a young child, in color AND in the black-and-white set; the real Fluent name behind each codepoint was checked (`art.fluent.folder_for()`), not assumed from the word: T-Rex 1f996 "T-rex", Sauropod 1f995 "Sauropod", egg 1f95a "Egg", volcano 1f30b "Volcano", bone 1f9b4 "Bone", footprints 1f463 "Footprints", rock 1faa8 "Rock". The same seven-word bank is printed as cut-apart cards twice — once for the request board, once for the sort board — for 14 classroom cards plus 7 home-page cards, 21 in all; this is an honest seven-word bank run through two board types, not a padded board, and it is never marketed as "seven dinosaurs."

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the tracker, the organizer, the home page and the family update, or print and use a pen. The board pages print on cardstock or plain paper; the card band cuts off the bottom and the board stays whole. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document, and it is not a test of anything.

It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule, and it does not decide what a count means for a student or when a board is done with, and it makes no claim about what a student knows about dinosaurs, fossils or geologic time. The tracker counts which boards were done and what help was given, and nothing else.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers and paraprofessionals running functional-vocabulary or naming practice with early, pre-reading or low-verbal students, case managers who need that practice to show up as data, and the families who get the home page.

More In The Collection

This binder is part of the Morning Work & Adapted Books Collection; more matching binders are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same boards-plus-tracker shape.

Pictures (color pages): Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0. Pictures (ink-saver pages): Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License.