Animal Habitats Sorting and Activity Sheets

Vito is 40 months old.

If you read my post on the 12 Months More of Montessori for Earth Science, Vito and I will be working on animal habitats.  We tried this before, in its simplest form when Vito was still a toddler and I decided to move forward into a more abstract approach (with some sensorial activity) now that Vito is older.  In this post, I’m going to share the learning materials which the boys are using and the books to go along with our activities.

MATERIALS:

We are using the Montessori Inspired Animal World Habitats Learning Pack that I have in the shop.  This learning pack includes the following:

• A map for each habitat
• 6 pictures of habitats (desert, temperate deciduous forest, grassland, tundra, taiga, rainforest)
• Definition card for each habitat
• 60 picture cards of animals (10 real pictures of animals for each habitat that you can use for your sorting activity)
• 2 sets of habitat cards
• Control and activity sheets

We are using these books by Cathryn Sill which I purchased in Book Depository (free shipping worldwide) and are also available in Amazon.  Beautiful books about the habitats of the world, with realistic illustrations of animals and its natural habitat. I highly recommend these books! They are perfect for toddlers, preschoolers and early readers.  Even my 8 years old loves them!

Animal Habitats of the World List of Books:

• Forests
• Grasslands
• Mountains
• Deserts
• Wetlands
• Oceans
• Polar Regions

Animal figures are quite essential of course.  We’ve collected a lot of Safari Toobs over the years and they’re really worth-it.  Some piece of advice, if you plan to purchase, get the animals that are in specific habitat/location such as:

• Safari Toob Deserts
• Safari Toob Wild Animals
• Safari Toob Arctic
• Safari Toob North America
• Safari Toob Rainforest
• Safari Toob River
• Safari Toob Ocean

These toobs are very helpful in this type of activity and in geography too!  Seen in the picture below is the grassland control sheet, the picture card and the grassland map.

FOR TODDLERS AND PRESCHOOLERS

If you are just starting to introduce the habitats, I highly recommend that you read the books to your kids first.  I did that with Vito, we read the books almost everyday until he finally became familiar with the concepts.  Here we are examining grasslands.  I have a small tray with fake grass in it. I placed the giraffe and the lion similar to the animals seen in the books, and I presented the grassland picture card as well.

For toddlers and young preschoolers (3 years old), we mostly used the animal picture cards and the control sheets.  We used it to plot/sort the animal figures according to their habitats.  Once your child is familiar with the six habitats, you can start the sorting activity.  I prepared 2-3 animal figures for each habitat so the work won’t be too heavy for Vito.

FOR GRADESCHOOLERS AND ELEMENTARY (OLDER KIDS)

The entire learning pack is intended for gradeschoolers.  There’s just so many things you can do with our learning materials from the different habitat or biomes of the world, identifying the geographical locations of each habitat or biome, sorting animals and more.  Here’s a glimpse of the materials and how you can use them:

These are the control sheets of the six habitats.  You can use these as introductory materials for the child, showing what the habitat looks like and the animals that thrives in each.

Description cards are also provided for each habitat.  Older kids can read this as part of reading practise.

Of course, the picture cards.  I highly recommend that you print these in a photo quality paper for best result (these are high quality images).  I’m using the Epson Premium Presentation paper and the photos turned out so beautiful!  The use of picture cards with animal figures can be extended by discussing what the animals are eating in that environment, the kind of protection they use (camouflage) and how they survive in that kind of environment.

And of course, if you don’t have animal figures, I have 60 pictures of animal cards that you can use for sorting.  These cards were really helpful when I didn’t have enough animal figures to use with our learning pack before.

We will be going into details in the next few days, focusing on one habitat at a time.  Most probably, we will start with grasslands, forests and desert and will not touch tundra and taiga, we’ll reserve that for the winter months.

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