Friday, March 30, 2012

All about Animals

Sorry I've been MIA for a while. I'm taking graduate courses twice a week and this time of the semester is super hectic!

Right before Spring Break we did a two week unit on Animals and their Habitats. I used activities from my All about Animals unit. I always love teaching about animals because the kids absolutely love it! We focused on habitats the first week by talking about where animals would live and what they would need. In their science journals, the kids chose different habitats and drew at least 3 animals that would live in that habitat.



We also did a habitat book where the kids drew habitats for different animals. They turned out so cute!



After habitats, we moved on to animal characteristics. We did a web for each animal and wrote facts we learned about them. We only did mammals, birds and fish so the book is only half finished. We have an insect/life cycle unit coming up so I will have them do reptiles, amphibians and insects then. I'll show you the whole book when I do that post. :)

After learning about mammals, we did a sort where we decided which animals were animals and which were not.


In math we did a graph game from my unit where we sorted animals by type and analyzed our data.


One of my favorite activities we did was to create mystery animal flip books. The kids wrote three clues on the front of the flip book and on the inside they wrote what the animal was. They loved sharing their clues with each other and having people guess.

Finally we talked about food chains and how animals need each other to survive. First we read Who Eats What? Food Chains and Food Webs by Patricial Lauber. Then the kids drew their own food chains in their science journals.

If you are interested in my animal unit, click the picture below! Stay tuned for another post about animals and life cycles! :)

1 comment:

Camille said...

Hi Kim! I have been using your "All ABout Animals" unit and love it (and so do my kiddos)!! I used some of your pages to create science notebooks for my kinders and firsties and as we learned about each type of animal, my students took notes in their notebooks. I also put the mammal sort and the animal graph in the notebook. For next year, I will need to add a few more books with facts about birds; I was a little light on that topic. Next week we are going to go in more depth with each animal type. Very fun! Thank you for such a great unit! (...and I appreciate that the font was a great one for my beginning readers! : )
Camille
An Open Door