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Children love learning about animals, especially ones which are big, scary, colourful, wild, and potentially dangerous! Once you have them captivated by the subject you’ll find that they are more than eager to learn the English vocabulary needed to talk about it. There are hundreds of language focus points you can develop when doing topics on zoo animals. Here are just some ideas to get you started.
Aims
- Introducing vocabulary
Zoo animals - zebras, elephants, hippos, ostriches, tigers, lions, giraffes, monkeys, peacocks, bears, seals, penguins…
- Colours, patterns and colour combinations – stripes, dots, spots, zig zags, multicoloured, black and white…
- Modals – can, must, mustn’t (as piece of vocabulary not as a grammar focus)
- Zoo verbs – buy, touch, feed, listen, watch, eat, run, shout, stroke…
Materials
- Map of the world
- Silhouette coloured stickers of zoo animals (buy by the bag in craft shops)
- A3 copies of a zoo diagram
- Zoo animals flashcards
- Scarf to blindfold
- Blu tack
- Coloured card
Rules at the zoo.
Brainstorm dos and don’ts at the zoo.
Ideas include:
1. You can feed the ducks.
2. You mustn’t feed the lions.
3. You mustn’t touch the elephant.
4. You must buy a ticket.
- Pre-teach verbs such as - feed, touch, buy, run, watch, shout, eat, stroke…
- You don’t need to go into the complex difference between all the modals.
- You can easily demonstrate the difference with how stern or relaxed you look when saying ‘You can feed the ducks’ (raise eyebrows and smile!) ‘You must buy a ticket’ (nod head and wag your finger) ‘You mustn’t feed the lions.’ (look horrified, shake head and pull a stern face!)
You can make a class poster of rules. You can also adapt this idea for more advanced pupils and make up opposite, rebel rules such as ‘You must eat lots of ice-cream.’ ‘You must stroke the lion!’ Make sure they understand that these are opposite rules though! To help you explain take the rules you’ve already created and make them into opposites before letting the children use their imaginations!
Design your own zoo.
- If they ran the zoo what changes would they make?
- What animal should go where?
- Should the bears go next to the fish?
- Why shouldn’t the snakes be in the same cage as the birds?…
- Draw a simple plan of a zoo with the word zoo written at the bottom, middle of the page on a gate.
- Then around the page you can draw several cages.
- Photocopy onto A3 and distribute to small groups or pairs.
- Each pair should have cut outs or stickers of animals that they can move around the page until they are satisfied with their allocation of animals into the cages.
- They should think about noises each animals makes, what they eat, whether they need a very cold cage or a very hot cage etc.
- Make your own before the class and demonstrate your logic before they attempt this quite challenging task.
What do zoo animals eat?
Study the different types of food that zoo animals eat. Part of the fun of going to a zoo is watching the animals being fed. Discover how often they should be fed and what exactly they eat.
http://www.littlerockzoo.com/edzoocation/theyeat.html
Animal body parts
Play a pairs games with these stylish flashcards. The children can take it in turns to pick a card and they have to categorize the animals depending on what body parts they have in common. http://bogglesworld.com/animal_body_parts.htm
What noises do they make?
You may find that where you teach the animals make different noises to those back home! This is generally true of farm and domestic animals (cats, dogs, cows, ducks etc) but see if any zoo animals make different noises. The children will love making the noises to compare to your English zoo animal noises.
Where do they come from?
- It’s important to put the animals into their original context and to not just present them as living in zoos.
- You could construct a class map of the world and stick silhouette stickers of zoo animals on the countries they comes from. Have colour codes for different continents.
Colours of the zoo
- Animals and birds such as parrots, pink flamingos, giraffes, lions, zebras etc are a great way of learning new colours and pattern vocabulary such as stripes, dots, zigzags, multicoloured etc. You could draw outlines of the animals for the children to fill in with the correct colours and patterns. Easily adapted to younger learners.
Mother and babies
- See if they can match the mother to the baby. You could do this with picture flashcards or with word flashcards for older children. The following link has a list of animals, their babies and the groups of animals. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/animals/Animalbabies.shtml
What does a zoo keeper do?
- Help the children understand the role of the zoo keeper. A real zoo keeper explains her job and how she started in the profession. http://webpages.charter.net/sbratcher/faq.htm
- Go to this site for an informative and accessible description of what a zoo keeper does: http://library.thinkquest.org/C002727/keeper.htm
Zoo games
- Sleeping lions – great for the end of a lesson as a calming activity. Everyone has to put their heads n their folded arms on their desks and keep as still as possible. If they move they are out!
- Stick the tail on the elephant Draw a large picture of the back of an elephant. Blindfold the children, gently spin them around and urge them into the direction of the elephant poster holding the tail of the elephant with a piece of blu-tack. Draw a number next to where they put the tail, have a number per pupil and see who’s the closet at the end of the game.
Zoo Songs
- Daddy’s taking me to the zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow.
Daddy’s taking me to the zoo tomorrow and we’re going to stay all day.
We going to the zoo, zoo, zoo.
How about you, you, you?
You can come too, too, too.
We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo.
Go to this link for the full set of lyrics http://www.sterlingtimes.org/children6.htm
- The monkey at the zoo goes eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
The monkey at the zoo goes eee, eee, eee, all day long.
The lion at the zoo goes roar roar roar…
The elephant at the zoo goes woah, woah, woah….
The snake at the zoo goes hiss, hiss, hiss…
The … at the zoo goes …, …, …, …
Get the children to fill in the gaps with other animals and noises.(Sing to the tune of ‘The wheels on the bus’)
Internet links
http://www.learningpage.com/ This site is recommended reading related to zoo animals
http://www.pacificnet.net/~cmoore/zoo/ This is an online storybook written by a father for his son about zoo animals
http://www.cp.duluth.mn.us/~sarah/rdr012.html This site has quite complex colouring pages of the zoo
http://www.alphabet-soup.net/dir7/zoo.html This is a simple single zoo animal colouring pages
http://abcteach.com/Extras/zoochecklist.htm This is a checklist for the children to tick off when visiting a zoo
http://library.thinkquest.org/C002727/firstpag.htm This is a very informative and fun site about a zoo.
By Jo Bertrand
