Animals
Paper Tube Bird Feeder
Take an empty toilet paper tube and spread peanut butter all round the outside edge of the tube. Roll the peanut butter tube in bird seed. Cut a piece of yarn that is about 12 inches long. Attach it to each end of the tube to make a way to hang the tube onto a tree.(read more)
What Will We See at the Zoo?
Before you go to the zoo you can get your toddler excited about all the animals he/she will see. Look through old magazines for pictures of animals he/she would like to see at the zoo. Help your child to cut the pictures out and paste them on paper. Staple the booklet together. When you go to the zoo, make sure you visit all the animals in your child's booklet. You ...(read more)
Milk Carton Bird Feeder
Cut out a long window on the side of an empty juice or milk carton (the side opposite from the pour nozzle). Paint the carton brown all over and leave it to dry. Once the first coat of brown is dry, add long streaks of dark brown and white, and small brown knots to make your bird feeder look like the bark on a tree. One ...(read more)
Squirrel Hunt
We leave the house and set out on a squirrel hunt. We spy them in trees, digging up nuts, chasing other squirrels. Count how many you can find! It's great - they are everywhere! (read more)
Shoebox Diorama
Almost all kids have little plastic animal figurines. This project gives your child something new to do with them. Take some old magazines and catalogs, and cut out pictures of scenery -- mountain ranges, jungles, forests, etc. Alternatively, your child can draw his or her own scenery. Then glue your scene to the bottom of the inside of a shoebox, and turn the box on its ...(read more)
Animal Freeze Dance
You can play this with or without a song. Pick an animal and say, "Dance like a rabbit!" After a little while say, "Freeze." Then stop moving and then call out another animal to imitate its movement. Between animals say, "Freeze." You can take turns with your child picking different animals to imitate. Pick animals that cover a variety of movements such as frogs, snakes, monkeys, elephants or ...(read more)
Jungle Party for One
Help your child cut out leaves and flowers from construction paper. Attach them to green crepe paper streamers. Attach the streamers to a hula hoop, and then attach the hula hoop to the ceiling so that the streamers make a jungle area. Have your child bring their plastic and stuffed jungle animals under the hoop for a fun jungle party. Great for rainy or cold days!(read more)
Spring Lamb
Your kids will have a lot of fun celebrating spring with this cute craft. Begin by gluing cotton balls all over a cardboard toilet paper tube. Next, poke four holes in what will become the bottom of the cotton ball-covered lamb -- two towards the front and two towards the back. These are the holes for the legs. Thread two black pipe cleaners through the holes ...(read more)
Stuffed Animal Stories
Put various stuffed animals in a bag. Have your child tell a real or make-believe story about a trip to a zoo or farm while pulling stuffed animals out of the bag one-by-one. Prompt them with questions to help the story along: "What animal did you see next?" "What sound does the lion make?" "How tall is the giraffe?"(read more)
Paper Bag Animals
Turn a brown lunch bag upside down so that the bottom of the bag becomes the top of the puppet. Use the flap for face, drawing on a nose and some eyes. When you open the flap, have your child draw a tongue under the flap or attach a tongue made from red construction paper. You can also have them glue ears to the top of the ...(read more)
Animal Inventory
My daughter loves animals, and I thought this would be a fun way for her to combine her love of animals with learning about our part of the world. We took a camera and walked around our neighborhood, taking pictures of all the animals that we saw. We then printed them up, glued them to pieces of paper, and stapled the paper together to create a book. ...(read more)
Paper Plate Masks
Use a small white paper plate as the base for a child's mask. Cut two holes about where the child's eyes will be, then punch one hole on either side of the paper plate and tie a piece of string or yarn through each hole. This will be what you use to tie the mask on the child's face. Once that's done, you can turn the plate ...(read more)
Jellyfish
Make a jellyfish with your preschooler and talk about animals that live in the ocean! Let your child decorate a plain white basket-type coffee filter. Once the decorations are done, attach a string to the top and streamers to the sides. Hang the jellyfish for one fancy decoration, or many jellyfish for a whole ocean of fun.(read more)
Christmas Wreath Bird Feeder
Don't just throw out your Christmas wreath; recycle it and decorate with treats it for your feathered friends! First make sure that there are no ornaments, lights, tinsel or glitter on the wreath. Decorate it with pieces of bread, pine cones (natural, no glitter or glue) rolled in peanut butter and bird or unsalted seeds, strings of berries and popcorn, bagels cut and covered with honey and ...(read more)
An Aquarium in the Fridge
Make one box of Berry Blue Jell-O, according to directions, and pour into clear glass or plastic containers. Allow to set in the refrigerator for about 1 hour. Carefully place gummy fish into each cup and return to the refrigerator. Each cup will look like a mini aquarium with colorful fish "swimming" inside! (read more)
Polly Want a Cracker
Take a cookie cutter and punch a nice shape out of a slice of white bread. You can save the scraps for breadcrumbs or make ones with the center cut out. Punch a hole into the bread for yarn to hang, thread the yarn through the bread shape. Then let the white bread shapes sit out for a day or two so that they become firm. ...(read more)
Animal Patterns
Here is a great activity when you are waiting at the doctor's office or at the airport or in the car. Start by making an animal sound and have your child imitate it. Then keep adding sounds and see if your child can follow the pattern (e.g. moo moo meow ruff). Then let your child take the lead and start a pattern you have to copy.(read more)
Bookmarking Basics
You can make really cute animal bookmarks by using foam shapes for animals found at a craft store or you can cut the shapes out yourself from larger pieces of foam. Begin with a small animal shape or animal face, and allow your child to decorate it with smaller pieces of foam, markers, and googly eyes. Glue a book-sized piece of ribbon to the back of the foam ...(read more)
Bird Watching
If you are in an area with several kinds of birds, take the time to learn the birds and point out the different kinds to your child and say hello. In our local park with have sparrows, cardinals, and bluebirds, and we say hello to them and talk about their colors. Now whenever my 19-month old daughter sees a bird in the sky she yells out, 'Hi baby bird!'(read more)
What Is That Animal?
We love to do this activity after visiting a zoo, but you can do it any time your child encounters a new animal he or she is not familiar with. For example, the last visit to the zoo, my son was enthralled with the Jaguars and must have had 50 questions on the way home. When we got home, we talked about the kinds of things we'd like ...(read more)
Animal Name Game
This is a fun and easy game to play in honor of Earth Day or any time! The object is to come up with as many names of animals who inhabit the earth as you can: You'll need at least 2 players with a strong grasp of the alphabet and some knowledge of spelling. The first player starts by saying the name of an animal, like monkey. ...(read more)
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A Great Book Rhymes!
Kids are a funny bunch. They are often loath to change and anything new. But still, our little ones are open to so much -- and so much more than we more ossified parents are! Think of poetry: preschoolers happily read and repeat poems with ease and
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