Children enjoy pretending to be zoo animals.
Children's interests in animals can inspire a zoo theme for a birthday party or a class field trip to the zoo. Show children animals from all over the world and describe how the animals move and sound. Play zoo games that highlight some of the children's favorite animals. Encourage the children to pretend they are animals as they play the games.
Elephant Soccer
Children can play elephant soccer, a game from the Alphabet Soup website. Children can stand in a circle with their legs far apart. Show children clasp their hands together and hang them down in front of their bodies like an elephant's trunk. Each player uses his trunk to hit a ball between the legs of the other players while blocking the ball from passing between his own legs.
Counting Cages
Practice counting zoo animals with an idea from the ChildFun website. Label plastic strawberry baskets with numbers one through 10. Include small dots under the number for children who cannot recognize numerals. Children can count out the correct number of small, plastic zoo animals and put them into the "cages." Extend the activity by pretending the animals got out of their cages at night and the zookeeper has to put them back into the cages. Make new signs to label the cages with colors or sizes so that children can sort the animals in different ways.
Animal Charades
Act like zoo animals in a game of animal charades from Thebestkidsbooksite.com. Pour a box of animal crackers into a bowl. One child chooses an animal cracker, but does not let the other children see it. The child acts like the zoo animal, while the rest of the children guess which animal he is portraying. When the group guesses correctly, the child gets to eat the animal cracker.
Spin and Spray
Play a variation of the spin the bottle game. Give each child a small spray bottle filled with water, and tell players that these are their elephant trunks. Children sit in a circle and hold the spray bottles in their laps. Set a bottle in the middle of the circle and spin it. The bottle will come to a stop and point to one person in the circle. The player makes a trumpeting sound and sprays his "elephant trunk" in the air, gently misting the other players with water. The player then spins the bottle again.
Tags: animal cracker, between legs, elephant trunk, into cages, other players, pretending animals