Looking for something for the kids to do while stuck at home or planning a safari, animal filled party, or an at home summer camp to prevent that summer slide? Try out a few of the activities below or pick one from each category or mix and match – whatever works for you!
ANIMAL DAYS
During this week, we focused on a few “favorite” animals but there’s so much out there, you can easily find topics for other animals.
WHAT TO WATCH
- These were some movies we watched just for fun:
- Wild Kratts Series. This is a great series for kids. It alternates between an animated portion and an actual people portion and focuses on animals each episode.
- On the educational side:
- Animals for Kids. Amazon Prime Video has a few short videos (4-5m) on different animals. You do have to purchase them, so we only selected a handful.
- Bringing the Zoo to You. The Brookfield Zoo has a youtube channel of short videos where they interact or teach things about animals in the zoo.
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
If your kids are like mine, they’ll eat food they prepare for themselves way more readily than if I make them. Here are a few that were fun and easy for them to put together:
- Fruit Turtles. While we used an ice-cream scooped honey dew for the body and small green granes for the legs and head, you can easily use any other ‘green’ colored fruit like kiwi or green apples.
- We also found this very cool shark snack craft from momendeavors.com but didn’t have a chance to try it out: Shark Attack Cups
- Ocean Life. With the mini-vegetable cutter, we were able to make mini fish and turtles, but you can skip that if you don’t have one. We used regular goldfish for (drum roll) the fish, green apples for the sea plants, and that eight-legged pretzel cheese mix is an octopus. It’s all sitting on a graham cracker but now that I think of it, we could have used a blue paper plate as well 🙂
EDUCATIONAL GAMES (Online and Printable)
If your little kiddos are in the mood for a little bit of learning and fun, try out a few of these online or printable games:
- Pbskids has quite a few games and videos related to Wild Kratts: Wild Kratts Headquarters. It pairs pretty nicely when they’ve watched a few of the episodes.
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. Here are a few favorite animals theme: (Books start off for younger crowds and move upward)
- Where is the Great Barrier Reef by Nico Medina
- Black Bear by Stephen R. Swinburne
- Step Into Reading – Dolphins by Sharon Bokoske
- A Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: Animals, Habitat, Bear, Turtle, Dolphin.. any of their favorite animals, etc…
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices.
- If you could have any type of animal adaptation, what would it be and why?
- If you lived in the Great Barrier Reef, describe a day in your life.
- If you could live with any type of bear family, which would it be (grizzly bear, brown bear, polar bear), which would it be and why?
CRAFTS
If your kids are anything like mine, they LOVE crafts – (mostly, I think, for making the mess 🙂 ). Here are few that we worked on during our space week and were pretty easy to handle. Now, you can really use any fruit or snacks you have, we just had these on hand
- Build a Zoo Mural! We printed out some animal coloring pages and added them to our ‘bare’ hallway wall along with makeshift trees, ponds, etc. made out of colorful tissue paper. It was quite a project but kept them entertained for quite a bit.
- Brookfield Zoo – Bringing the Zoo to You. This page is a great resource not only for the videos at the top but also for some printable activities at the bottom. They are pretty easy to do as well, not much additional material needed for most of them except for things you might already have at home (crayons, scissors, etc…)
- Whale Puppets. (scholastic.com). This one was fairly easy and we encouraged our kiddos to create a little skit with their whale puppets. Though those videos will not be posted here :), they had a lot of creativity when coming up with dialogue and story lines and did have quite a bit of fun. We didn’t have straws and ended up using pencils – whatever works!
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: Frolicking Fox Cubs – At Home Play / Summer Guides.
Happy Planning!
