Dog Themed Learning Activities

I read that May is National Pet Month, so I thought it would be fun to share some animal related learning and craft activities this month. First up is dogs (not because they’re my favorite, just the easiest LOL).

Animal faces and dog bones give us lots of options for adding in a little learning. Keep it simple for little ones with this Dog’s Colorful Day bones color sorting activity from Pre-K Pages. It includes a printable bone shape in different colors to make it easy. Read the book and do this activity with your littles.

Or try the alphabet puppy chow activity that’s also from Pre-K Pages. Here you find letters on the bone and use alphabet magnets to “feed” the dog.

If you have a dog you can use the printable from Sunny Day Family to see what your kid knows about the dog. This is like one of those Mother’s or Father’s Day printables where they say how old the dog is, their (the dog’s) favorite things and what they (the child) likes to do with them. This is one page of their printable dog activity pack that includes labeling parts of a dog, a word search and coloring pages.

Homeschool Preschool has a dog themed memory matching game, which includes fun facts about dogs on the cards.

There are lots of books with dogs as characters, and this activity from Affordable Homeschooling uses If You Give a Dog a Donut to practice sequencing with a free printable.

Harry the Dirty Dog is another fun dog story, about a dog who doesn’t want to take a bath. Homeschool Share has a printable lap book that goes with the story and includes vocabulary, human vs. animal needs, wild vs. domesticated animals, sequencing and more.

If you want to do more activities surrounding dirty dogs, Homeschool Preschool has a printable sequencing activity about giving a dog a bath where kids can trace the sentences for each step and them write them on their own.

And if you have any little plastic dog toys (or any pets for this one) you can get them dirty and wash them with this pet cleaning sensory bin from Pre-K Pages (using mud and water so maybe do this one outside).

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Easy Sensory Activities for Valentine's Day

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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