T-Rex Key Details and Facts Lesson Plan

Reading and Understanding Informational Text lesson plan student level: Pre-K to 3rd grade elementary

• Questions about T-Rex Facts handout (Included at the end of the lesson plan)
• The children’s picture book – How to Care for Your T-Rex by Ken Baker, illustrated by Dave Coverly (ISBN- 250137519)

Reading and Understanding Informational Text lesson plan activity time: 30-45 minutes, depending on discussion time and use of optional activities. 

Objective of Reading and Understanding Informational Text lesson plan: Help teachers achieve language arts common core standards for helping students develop skills related to being able to understand key details from informational text.

Preparation for Reading and Understanding Informational Text lesson (Optional): Make enough copies of the Questions about T-Rex Facts handout for each student.

Ask and Answer Questions about Key Details in a Text

Read the picture book How to Care for Your T-Rex to the whole class. After reading the book, help students develop their reading comprehension and information recall skills by asking students a variety of questions about the story and discuss their answers. Be sure to allow many students to share their answers and opinions.
Example of questions answers may include the following:

• Question: What was the story about? Answers: A boy and his pet T-Rex. How to care for a pet T-Rex. How to teach a T-Rex manners. Fun things to do with a T-Rex. How to get a T-Rex to go to bed.
• Question: Who was the main character? Answers: A boy. A T-Rex. A T-Rex named Buddy.
• Question: What were the different settings of the story? Answers: A house. Neighborhood. Park. Street. Soccer field. Tree.
• Question: How did the boy care for his T-Rex? Answers: Took him for walks. Played with him. Taught him manners. Was kind to him. Read him stories. Brushed his teeth. Gave him hugs.
• Question: Why did the T-Rex hide in the tree? Answers: He felt bad. His feelings were hurt. He didn’t want to get in trouble.
• Question: Why shouldn’t you tickle a T-Rex? Answers: It makes a mess. It makes it hard for them to settle down.

Advanced Questions and Key Details in Informational Text (Optional)

Throughout the story, How to Care for Your T-Rex presents various facts about T-Rex. Help students develop their ability to recall specific information and facts from the text by asking the following questions that are answered in the text of the story. You can ask the questions aloud and have the students answer as part of a discussion or you can use the Questions about T-Rex Facts Handout.

• How many pounds of meat could T-Rex eat in a day?
• How long were T-Rex claws?
• How much could a T-Rex weigh?)
• How fast could a T-Rex run?
• How long were T-Rex teeth?
• About how tall was a fully-grown T-Rex?
• How long could the tail on T-Rex grow?
• How long were T-Rex arms?

Creative Writing Activity (Optional)

Imaginative Creative Writing: Ask the students to write about the things they would do if they had a pet T-Rex.

More Fun T-Rex Facts (Optional)

At the back of How to Care for Your T-Rex is a list of More Fun Facts about T-Rex. As an optional activity, you can read some of these facts to the students or let them read them themselves, and then test them on their ability to remember the facts. You could also make a game of it by splitting the class into teams and giving each team points for being able to remember answers to the facts.

Learn about T-Rex Video (Optional)

As a supplement to this lesson plan or any unit on dinosaurs, how the class the video Learn About T-Rex: How Fast Could T-Rex Run, which explains why scientists don’t think T-Rex could run as fast as they used to think T-Rex could run.




To print this lesson plan: Download a printer-friendly PDF version of the T-Rex Key Details and Facts lesson plan