If your children love animals, these zoo playdough mats are a great activity for them. They promote a number of learning concepts necessary for pre-k and kindergarten. There are so many ways to play while learning with this bundle, your students will NEVER get bored!
Our zoo playdough mats work as the perfect supplement for math, language arts, and science lessons, and you can use them at home or in the classroom!
Zoo Animal Play Dough Mats Bundle for Young Learners
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Supplies Needed:
- Zoo Animal Playdough Packet PDF file
- Cardstock
- Printer
- Write and Wipe Sheet Protectors (or laminate)
- Playdough
- Fine Motor Task Boxes for Storage
Need to make playdough to use with these zoo playdough mats? Find two amazing playdough recipes below!
Easy Playdough Recipe
Our most trusted and favorite classic play dough recipe!
How to Make Playdough Without Flour
Learn this simple trick for making play dough at home without flour!
How to Make Playdough Animals?
This packet includes cards that feature many animals your children can make with playdough. Animals in this pack are:
- Elephant
- Giraffe
- Lion
- Tiger
- Bear
- Zebra
- Penguin
- Moose
- Seal
- Panda
- Parrot
- Snake
- Gorilla
- Wolf
- Stingray
- Polar Bear
- Arctic Fox
- Dolphin
- Jellyfish
- Turtle
- Yak
- Monkey
Let your kids follow the guided cards to create their favorite wild creatures. Fine motor skills and strong hand muscles are both supported through the use of playdough. They can read the card before making the animal, promoting phonics and letter/word recognition.
The variety of animals make them easy to use while teaching other science lessons. For example, if your kids are studying the ocean, you could pull out the dolphin, stingray, and jellyfish cards. Or grab the polar bear and arctic fox when discussing Antarctica for a visual representation of the animals that live there.
There are also 16 zoo scenes included for pretend play as your child works with the playdough. You can have them create animals to “meet” and tell a story about their interaction on the scene cards. Kindergarteners may also want to grab a pencil and write down their stories!
Build Cages for The Zoo Animals Playdough Mats
Just like your children view their favorite creatures in cages at the zoo, they can safely keep their playdough zoo animals behind bars too! These cards feature the number of craft sticks needed in the top right corner to support number recognition. Early readers may also be able to read the bottom sentence, identifying the number word.
The cages require a different number of craft sticks, so they can foster counting as well. Teaching subtraction can also be done with these task cards, by starting with a larger cage and then moving to a smaller one. You can also lay out more sticks than needed, and then ask your child how many sticks they can take away to make the next animal’s cage.
Build and Match the Zoo Animal Footprint
Building zoo animal footprints with playdough fosters another set of learning concepts, along with motor skills. A great science lesson is taught when asking the children to identify each animal by their footprint (you can cover the bottom part of each card to make the guessing a real challenge!).
Kindergarteners can work on classification skills by looking through the footprints and determining which animals have toes/feet and which have hooves. They can also notice which prints have claws and which do not. These footprints can supplement further lessons on specific animals or their habitats.
Printable Zoo Animal Playdough Packet
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