We have had a blast learning about pets this week through our play based activities. While we do not have pets of our own, Little Miss absolutely loves animals and had so much fun with all of the fun activities we did this week.
Our Pet week activities can be found in our March Play calendar post. Here is a look into all the things that we did this week. The printables we used are available as a free download at the end of the post. This post also contains affiliate links for your convenience.
We read so many amazing books about pets and animals this week, many we had and many we checked out of the library. The library is such a wonderful resource so be sure you take advantage of your local library.
We started off the week with a day dedicated to puppies and all the stuffed animals Mr. Mac-n-Taters and I have kept from our childhood came in handy and helped make Puppy Day even more fun.
We did some non standard measurement with some dog bones and found out our big stuffed dog was 14 bones long and a lot of our little ones were three bones long. This was the perfect activity to work on one-to one correspondence, as well as measurement. Once Little Miss lined up all the bones we would count each one, making sure to touch each one as we said a number, to see how long each thing we measured was.
Little Miss painted a puppy I printed out. I loved watching her paint this. She was doing such a good job making sure to stay inside the lines and get all of the white space. We typically use chunky paint brushes, but this time I let her use a small one that I typically use and she had so much more control than when she uses the chunky ones.
Cat Day brought many fine motor activities and Little Miss absolutely LOVED them. This feed the cat fine motor activity was so easy to set up. I took a brown paper bag and cut a hole out of it on one side. I attached a cat clipart image to it after I cut a hole in its mouth for the food to go in. We had some stale cereal I use for different activities and I gave it to Little Miss in a bowl and gave her a spoon and she fed the kitty cat until the bowl was empty and then she started over. Every time she “fed” the kitty I would make meowing noises and she absolutely LOVED it.
We finished off cat day with a Cat whisker lacing activity. I laminated a cat image and cut it out and punched some holes in it. Little Miss laced black pipe cleaners through it to create whiskers.
On Bird Day we broke out the feathers and did some feather painting. This is one of our favorite activities to do around Thanksgiving time and was perfect for bird day too. We ended up using her feather painted page and turned it into a birthday card for her friend.
Little Miss does a fantastic job sorting things by color, but sorting by size was completely new to her. Her initial reaction was to sort the eggs by color, but after modeling sorting by size a couple times and asking her questions like “Is this one the same size as this one already sorted?” Do these ones match?, she did a fantastic job and for the next couple days I would hear her saying “Big, Medium, Small” when talking about different objects in our home.
Fish Day brought some more sorting and a new skill, graphing. Little Miss loved this activity because she got to munch on the goldfish while she sorted and graphed. She used our fish bowl sorting mats to get all the goldfish sorted and then one by one she added them to the graph and we counted them together and talked about what it means to graph and how the numbers on the side indicate how many total.
We also practiced our shapes with our fine motor shape art activity that we created inside a cut out of a fish.
Our final activity of the week was our animal species sort. You can read all about it and download a copy of the the sorting activity here.
We finished the week off with a Pet “Parade” and picnic. Little Miss paraded her different animals around our playroom and then we had a picnic with all our animals and dined on homemade puppy chow, egg salad sandwiches, and meow mix/goldfish. It was the perfect way to end one of our favorite weeks of tot school yet.
I have compiled many of the printables we used this week into one free download for you. These printables are for personal or one classroom use only. I hope you enjoy these and would love if you tagged me on IG @macntaters_playlearngrow used our hashtag #mnttotschool or messaged me if you use these items with your little ones. I love to see others enjoying these materials too.
Love these idea, especially the beautiful photos for the pet sort and the cat whisker activity. Unfortunately,I don't seem to be able to download the file. Any suggestions?
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