Animal Themed Activities for Toddlers

My little girl loves animals so much, she's so interested about them, their names, the sounds they make (I remember how she gets stunned with cat's "meows" and dog's barks when she was around 9 months old), their habitat, and more.

So I decided to make a list of the fun activities/plays we had about learning animals so far. These were mostly an introduction on learning about animals, and didn't require a lot of time in terms of preparation. we just basically use whatever animal toys/replicas we have at that time. Of course as much as I want to recreate those bunch of wonderful homeschooling lessons that you can find on the world wide web, it's quite hard to find time. So this working Mommy's solution is to just recreate as much play as we can using whatever toys she have at the moment.

These plastic mold shape sea animals is a great tool we used in introducing her the animals that swims on the water. We had fun using them during our bath-time plays and sand play (during one of our beach trip). Aside from the fun and learning that these plays gives to her, she also acquire developmental advantages for physical, social, cognitive, sensory, and speech.

Next was this animal wooden puzzle, she loves naming each animals before fitting them in their right place. We sometimes use this on our story telling sessions if there are animals involve.

This Melissa & Doug Water Wow coloring book, also helps her in identifying different types of animals and their habitats, as this book has 4 animal-themed pages---farm animals, sea animals, pet animals and jungle animals. This book have faded pictures which shows up when the water pen rubbed over them,  she loves finding those hidden item listed on the back side of the previous page.

My little girl loves story telling so much, even more if its about animals, she always choose stories about animals every bedtime story session. And to make our story telling more exciting & fun I sometimes bought books like these. With these a simple story telling become a playful one.

She loves those big eyes of the insects.

includes a finger puppet head of the main character. 
She giggles whenever I animate the puppet while reading. 
We also have the puppy and mouse version of these books. 

"I got big eyes too, like Mr. Ant, Mommy" --she said

I was so amazed how Jashley was able to recognized all this animals in their silhouette. This was used on the animal hunting activity prepared by my cousins for the kids on our family Christmas party last December. These silhouetted animals was scattered all over the place/venue (under the tables/chairs, behind the trees/plants, etc.), We were given list of the animals we need to find. As we were hunting this cutout animals I was so surprised that she was able to identify almost all the animal we found and when I check the list it's sure does written there. Well I think the wooden animal puzzle is somehow responsible for that.

She enjoys this simple game wherein someone will show her the cutout, then she'll say the color, the name and the sound of that particular animal.

here is Papa (FIL) and her playing that game

there she was making the sound of the lion... ROAR!!!!!

and the elphants trumpet sound... EEEEEEE!!!!

This Cutout Animal Foam-sheets not only helps her in terms of expanding her vocabulary and language skills but also helps develop her cognitive skills and a great visual sensory activity.

She was recently got curious about land, water and sky animals, that she frequently checks on me whether a *insert any animal name here* walks on the land/fly in the sky/swim on the water. So to make her understand more about it I bought an animal replicas, made a land/grass sensory bin using a green colored spaghetti pasta that was break into pieces to make it look like grass and filled a basin with water and add a drop of blue food coloring to make it look like an ocean.

I asked her to sort out the animals in its respective habitats. She had fun doing this activity causing us to repeat it several times as requested by her.  

carefully bringing the animals on their respective home

"this donkey walks on the land, right Mommy?" -she asked

And this another activity that I just quickly put up when she suddenly demand for a play, I grab one of her animal book and ask her to match her animal replicas to the pictures of the animals in the book.

She's busy working with the activity when she noticed that she don't have the replicas of some of the animals in the pictures, She blurted out "Wala ako rabbit (I don't have rabbit), lets buy a rabbit Mommy, Ok?".

This may not much as compared to the overwhelming animal activity on web that I wanted to recreate for her, but knowing that my little girl enjoyed every single activity we did, it definitely made me happy and inspired to prepare more activities/plays for her.