Zoo

Personal Social and Emotional

With the children talk about favourite animals. Would we see any of these in a zoo? Why do you like them?    Hide toy zoo animals around the outdoor area. Encourage the children to work as a team to find them.                                                                                          

Communication and Language

Play a listening and attention game with the children. Place a few small zoo animals on a tray ask the children to name them. Then cover the animals with a blanket and remove an animal. Ask the children if they can name the animal which has been removed.  Use the Zoo animal display photos to introduce the children to different animals. Encourage children to talk about what they can see.

Physical

Play a movement guessing game – Challenge children to move like a zoo animal for the rest of the group to identify.   Provide playdough of different colours along with different materials such as feathers, googly eyes, paper shapes and pipe cleaners, to encourage children to make zoo animal models.

Literacy  

Provide Zoo animal photos to encourage children to use descriptive language.

Read the stories about Zoo animals such as ‘Dear Zoo’ and ‘Busy Zoo’.

Mathematics 

Make a collection of small world zoo animals. These could then be used for a variety of counting activities, such as the estimation game; encourage children to estimate and then count how many animals there are. Also encourage children to compare the group sizes.  Provide a set of balance scales and some small world zoo animal toys. Encourage children to explore and compare the weights of the different zoo animals.

 Understanding the World

Look at some maps of different zoos. Encourage the children to talk about what they can see on the maps. Discuss the different areas. Use the internet or non-fiction books to find out where some zoo animals live in the wild. Compare some contrasting places such as Arctic regions, rainforests and safari areas and the animals that live there.

Expressive Art and Design

Explore ways of moving to represent different zoo animals. For example, lions prowling around, rhinos charging around, cheetahs running, hippos rolling in mud, penguins waddling, parrots flying, fish swimming and snakes slithering around.

Provide paper plates and a variety of different materials to decorate the plates to look like zoo animals.

Focused Vocabulary

Zoo, Zookeeper, Crocodile, Elephant, Giraffe, Hippo, Lion, Monkey, Penguin, Rhino, Tiger, Zebra.