So in my day home i have several boxes of toys that i store in the basement and rotate through to help keep interest. in these boxes is a BIG box of zoo stuff! Which for some reason i have never planned activities to go with. So here is what i came up with.
I made a memory/matching card game, with small zoo animal shapes to go with. i was searching on line for pictures of animal tracks that i could use to make a matching track to animal game but had no luck.
I also put out several zoo puzzles that are not pictured and a memory game from madgascar movie, it's actually a cool one, it has close up pictures of the animals fur/skin to match to the animals cartoon version, and real version.
This was inspired by pinterest, i put a collection of small stuffed animals in and the children could guess what zoo animal they found. My day home 5 year old loved this game and asked to play quite a few times.
Animal tracks in play dough, this was not as successful as the tracks in paint. the children used this as an invitation to bring whatever toys they wanted in the play dough. I do set limits for the children in the day home, there are play dough toys specifically for play dough, and other toys are not to be in the play dough. Its never been a problem until i did this activity. For some reason doing tracks in paint never caused issues, but tracks in play dough i don't think i would do again. Maybe some of you are thinking who cares if they put other toys in play dough, but then it's hard to seperate the play dough toys from not play dough toys and basically you end up with playdough crumbs everywhere or squwished into the carpet.
pin the tail on the zebra and lion, Nic thought this was lame (it's supposed to be a donkey!), put it was a hit! They even wanted to be blind-folded to play.
The books! Every theme i display a collection of books on the theme, to further their learning, encourage interest in the theme and again change things up! The children would actually be more then happy to read the same books over and over, but i get bored!
The zoo toys, our display tents went perfect with the zoo theme.
more toys! There is zoo puppets (so we put on a zoo puppet show), zoo toys to go with toys in above pic, zoo stuffies and those funny heads on sticks that you can close their mouths, we had fun trying to clean up the play room using those.
animal track painting! this is a huge success! i have done it before with dinosaurs too.
the zoo masks i made! I also have a small collection of animal dress up stuff that was pulled out. I decided i need to make a zoo keeper costume for next time.
i just like this picture!
This was our father's day craft. first the boys had to take wrappers off, then line up the pretzels and place a hershey kiss on top. then i raced them into the oven (this project would be easier with 1 or 2 children, or if you used a work space closer to the oven.)
Then when the hershey kisses were softened they pushed an M & M in them. Because i only had a small amount of hershey kisses and wanted to send the gift home i told the boys that we would snack after we were done, i counted out the right amount of hershey kisses and pretzels for each boy then had counted a few extra M & M's, i told them that when they were done making all the pretzel's they could eat whatever m & m's were left in their bowl and it worked just fine!
No comments:
Post a Comment