Download a FREE copy of our Animal Tracks. On how we used this, click here or the image below. Enjoy!
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Investigating Animal Tracks and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, 28 October 2015
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We are continuing on our study of animal identification and learning more about their characteristics. After watching Deadly 60 series of Steve Backshall, we discovered that you can also identify animals by the tracks they make! So we used our favourite Schleich animal figures to test this. We randomly dipped the animals in the black paint and freely made tracks. Vito’s helping as well!
The tracks and trails an animal leaves can tell us the type of animals it is and whether it was walking or running, and you can also tell if it was by itself or with a group of other animals.
Footprints of animals are very tricky to identify unlike that of humans! But by thorough investigation, you can tell if the animal is hoofed or with paws or toes. To learn about the footprints of these animals, one must have a proper observation for these unique characteristics.
Animal tracks to note:
- Did the animals walk on 2 or 4 feet?
- Does the animal left a large or small track?
- Was it walking or running?
- Was it just one animal or followed by another?
Using our printable and the actual tracks, Mavi grouped the animals according to the characteristics of their footprints:
- Raccoon and bear have 4 toes front and 5 toes rear, they have claws.
- Dog, fox and wolf have 4 toes front, 5 toes rear and produces an egg shaped track
- Lion, lynx produces a round track with claws, 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
- Deer, elk have heart shaped tracks and has 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
And the highlight of this lesson is for them to see how their footprints look like!
Materials Used:
Thank you for taking time to read this post! You might as well visit our Zoo Animal Tracks post for another activity that involves playdough. It’s a not as messy as black paint
Don’t forget to PIN for later!
Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!
Here are the featured animal-themed activities for this week!
Learning About Caves from Natural Beach Living
H is for Hibernate from In Our Pond
Squirrel Activities for Tots from Every Star Is Different
DIY Montessori-Inspired Sensory Habitats from Mama’s Happy Hive
Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.
If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:
- Montessori Education
- Homeschool
- Sensory Play
- Tot and Preschool Trays
- Fine and Gross Motor Activities
- Kids in the Kitchen
- Healthy Recipes for Kids
- Arts and Crafts
- Natural Living
- Free Educational Printables
- Family-Oriented Activities
- Healthy Living
Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:
Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest
GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
- Please link up 1-3 posts
- Follow each of the hosts on social media
- When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
- By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.
- Please visit a couple of shared posts and leave a comment for them
- Remember that you must link back in order to be featured
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Classifying Vertebrate Animals
Tuesday, 20 October 2015
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I love unplanned activities. Mavi would always resort to this activity whenever he’s bored on Fridays (swimming lessons were moved on Saturdays). I like that he can do this activity independently, while learning the important characters of animals that belong in each group.
I believe that it is important for the child to have a clear and defined idea of the classes of the animal kingdom and its division. What’s important to me is to have him gain the knowledge with this activity rather than reading and memorizing the difference in books.
Just by looking at the animal cards or the figures it is obvious that birds differ from fish or that the turtles differ from mammals because only mammals nourished their young by milk through the breast of the mother.
So this is what I usually do, we either work on picture cards as seen above, or work using our basket of animal figures and have Mavi sort them as he describes why that animal belongs to mammals, fish, birds, reptiles or amphibians. This is a wonderful activity on rainy days or winter! How fascinating that my son is glued every time he does this.
Easy to prepare yet fun to perform!
Animal figures used are from Schliech and Safari toob. The cards are from Vertebrate Sorting Cards file.
Don’t forget to PIN this for future reference!
Letter Z: Zoo Animal Activities
Saturday, 3 October 2015
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Vito is 22 months old.
Vito is currently obsessing over his Schleich zoo animals. I just started collecting these animal figures early this year as I can see that both of my boys can benefit from it. I decided to put together zoo-themed activities for the little Vito, an opportunity to learn and explore the letter ‘z’.
Dear Zoo Story Basket
Vito loves this Dear Zoo book! We read it over and over again each day, and he specifically loves opening and closing the flaps to discover the animal hidden in it.
Zoo Animal Tracks
My boys can’t get enough of playdough, and we used our Schleich animals to create beautiful tracks! It was a total hit!
Animal Skin Covers
And who wouldn’t love skin patterns! It amazes me how Vito can match the animals with its cover! I only prepared 6 of his favourite animals and he is working on them everyday. As we progress, I’ll add up some more to make it challenging for him.
Letter Z Craft
Our letter of the week (craft) is usually hanged in the wall for a week’s view (for recognition) LOL.
Animals Clean Up
Original plan was to wash and brush these animals. But it was cold and we couldn’t do it indoors so I ended up giving him the wipes instead. He enjoyed this!
Zoo Animals Matching Cards
Something that he do everyday as well, matching the figures with the cards! This activity is for object recognition, discrimination and exactness. You can download your FREE copy from here.
The images in the cards are from Schleich.
Letter Z Object Basket
Our object basket is typically for letter recognition and phonics sounds.
And that’s all about our fun adventure of learning the letter z sound and zoo animals. Stay tuned for our next letter sound of the week… something to do with autumn! And yes, please don’t forget to pin this for later!
Other letter sound we’ve done:
FREE Zoo Animals Matching Cards
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
Vito is 22 months
Vito is in to matching these days! Whenever he sees an object that has a match on books, he would immediately get it and put it together. We started matching activities earlier with our Farm Animal Activities, and since we moved to zoo animals, I also created a set of matching cards for our figures (all Schleich images). So far we’re only using the tiger, jaguar, alligator, hippopotamus, elephant and lion figures.
The basket is setup in our shelf, and he loves to work on it in the morning. He would help himself by setting up the rug and work on his matching activity.
If you’d like to own a copy, click on any of the images or here. Enjoy!
Zoo Animal Tracks
Saturday, 12 September 2015
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If you are looking for a simple activity that will keep your kids hooked for a longer period of time, this is one I highly recommend. Recently I bought a few Schleich animals from a local store because it was on sale. Since Vito looooves animals, I whipped this activity in an instance, just in time to make use of our white PlayDoh.
Materials needed: different animal figures with detailed tracks (I highly recommend Schleich) and playdough (PlayDoh).
One by one, create tracks of your animals in the dough. Vito was fascinated of the tracks! He wanted to do it by himself
Here’s a closer look of the tracks. How cool is it that they’re all so detailed!
Can you identify which animals they belong to?
Yay! We didn’t have enough dough though. But Vito played with this for a long time! We’ll definitely do this more often.
Hope you like this post. Don’t forget to pin for later!
For more toddler activities visit my Pinterest:
Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Tot School Series on Pinterest.Animal Covers and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
We are having a laid back summer and enjoying activities that are random. Just like this subject of animal covers. I was preparing materials for our South America and Mavi couldn’t wait to use the cards!
He loves animals and are always on the look out for things on how he can learn about them. One time while sitting down and looking at the cards, I asked him if he can see any difference between the covers of animals living in Africa and that in South America. He said that those in South America are more colorful than in Africa.
I talked briefly of how these animals adapt to their environment and use their covers to protect their selves. The animal covers can tell us where they live, their habitat, what they eat and their protection for weather and predators. Reason why those in Africa are more of brown-black and dirty white because of the desert and dry places while in South America, most live in the Amazon forest.
I love simple activities like this that you can easily whip! Our animal figures are stored in a basket which I made available in the sitting room. This will allow the boys to freely use the animals and learn about them whenever they want to. Our animal cards are stored in plastic folders so I can easily spot them and are also made available in the sitting room.
Materials are from Africa in a Nutshell and South America in a Nutshell.
Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!
Here are the featured activities for this week!
Composers. Swan Lake Painting and Hand Print Art by My Bright Firefly
Hands-on Learning About Bees by Mama’s Happy Hive
Ocean Animal Color and Read Printable Book by A Little Pinch of Perfect
Beach Bucket Math by Mom on the Move
Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.
If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:
- Montessori Education
- Homeschool
- Sensory Play
- Tot and Preschool Trays
- Fine and Gross Motor Activities
- Kids in the Kitchen
- Healthy Recipes for Kids
- Arts and Crafts
- Natural Living
- Free Educational Printables
- Family-Oriented Activities
- Healthy Living
Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:
Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest
GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
- Please link up 1-3 posts
- Follow each of the hosts on social media
- When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
- By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.
- Please visit a couple of shared posts and leave a comment for them
- Remember that you must link back in order to be featured
<div align="center"><a href="http://christianmontessorinetwork.com/category/learn-and-play" title="Christian Montessori Network"><img src="http://www.christianmontessorinetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/learn-and-play-link-up-150-150.png" alt="Christian Montessori Network" style="border:none;" /></a></div>Please Follow
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The Annelids: Earthworms and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
We’ve been seeing worms a lot lately in the yard. And I have to be honest here, I never really liked them! In fact, I am terrified of worms! But the boys seem to be pretty amused with these creatures. So while we are seeing them around in the garden, I took out our earthworm life cycle figures for us to explore (which my Aunt brought when they came here to visit).
Before heading to the life cycle of worms, Mavi and I read about earthworms on the net. Here are some facts that we found fascinating about worms!
Earthworms are mostly 90% made up of water. Wow! Now, I made this materials, similar to my Animal Life Cycle learning resources. I love this approach as Mavi can retain so much information on presenting the life cycle this way.
And because I can’t take earthworms indoors nor conduct a hands-on learning on earthworms anatomy, we used our worm figure instead to examine the parts of an earthworm.
And because I wanted to integrate Vito into our activities, we made some wormy meal (unhealthy!). I made Vito hammer a few Oreo cookies… and use it as soil.
Then we added some wormy jellies for everyone to feast on!
Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!
For this week, I’d like to feature amazing printables that I’d like to try for my kids! These are created by generous mothers who wanted to share with us what they are currently using in their own home school. Thank you so much for these Moms!
Galapagos Animals 3 Part Cards by In Our Pond
France 3 Part Cards by Welcome to Mommyhood
Ocean Animals Clip Card by A Little Pinch of Perfect
Planets Learning Pack by 3 Dinosaurs
Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.
If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:
Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!
Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:
Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest
GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
<div align="center"><a href="http://christianmontessorinetwork.com/category/learn-and-play" title="Christian Montessori Network"><img src="http://www.christianmontessorinetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/learn-and-play-link-up-150-150.png" alt="Christian Montessori Network" style="border:none;" /></a></div>Please Follow
Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Pinay Homeschooler on Pinterest.
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