Using Animals In Education At Home

The early years learning stage is an important time in a child’s development, and at the moment, most children are missing out on what they would usually learn at school and nursery as they’re isolating at home. But this stage is a great time to introduce topics about animals, and use them as a way to educate children in a lot of aspects of education. 

Games for Educational Purposes

You could play the mini game ‘Can you guess the pixelated animal? to help keep little entertained, and teach them about endangered animals. With many parents now trying to come up with ways to keep the kids entertained, this is a great way to keep children’s brains active, their eyesight interacting with their brains, and keeping them learning whilst they’re not at school with the facts they also give. 

Counting Animals

Maths in early years can be hard to get right, but using animals as a way to get children counting, and adding and subtracting, is an ideal way to utilise them. Counting how many of the same animal are on a sheet, adding them together, and taking them away. I think using a subject as numbers can make it more interactive and want children to join in more. 

The Correct Usage Of Colour

Twinkl have a whole range of animal early years resources and can really benefit children. Colouring sheets are a great way to get children to practise colouring in the lines, looking up animals and making sure they’re using the right colours, and even going for and abstract and changing up the colours to create their own design. 

In Stories

Books are a great way to get children’s imaginations going, and there are plenty out there that have animals as their main characters. Let your child look for a book that is about their favourite animal, and then they can practise reading it, sounding out the trickier words, and learning new words too. 

Drawing Animals

You can ask your children to look at their favourite animals and think about what shapes makes up their outline – triangles for cat ears, an oval for their face etc. And then get them drawing up their chosen animal using only shapes, to see how they can improvise with shapes to create their animal.