Zoo Learning Activities for Kids

Summer seems like the perfect time to think about (or visit!) the zoo, but it’s great to add in a zoo-themed unit or a fun zoo day or week any time of year. Here are some fun printables, activities and other ideas for kids to do related to the zoo.

First off, if you are actually planning a zoo visit, I found several zoo scavenger hunt printables you might want to check out:

You could even find pictures of the zoo animals to print out and do a scavenger hunt at home if you’re not heading to the zoo right away. Or check out these other zoo themed activities and printables you can use at home.

Homeschool Preschool has printable writing worksheets with zoo animals like dolphins and monkeys. ABCs of Literacy has lots of great zoo themed activities, including a beginning sounds bingo game, syllable sort and color by letter, to name a few.

You’ll also find lots of great stuff at Parenting Chaos, such as printable zoo STEM challenge cards, two-piece animal puzzles and habitat clip cards (there is a charge for their activities or they have a membership that gets you access to tons of resources).

At Homeschool Share you can find cute count and clip cards with a zoo theme, as well as a roll and cover dice game.

Confidence Meets Parenting has some fun zoo jokes for kids (my favorite: what kind of snake would you find on a car? A windshield viper!) Coffee and Carpool has a super cute set of A to Z animal alphabet pages that’s also a story about how the animals are kind to each other (like elephant makes sure everyone gets invited).

If you have small beads that are shaped like animals (if not you can get them here) you can play this animal counting game for preschoolers from The Educators’ Spin on It.

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply