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Are you looking for a great way to keep your students engaged in daily learning activities? Crafts are always a hit, but animal crafts are even better! There’s just something about incorporating animals into lessons that brings instant engagement. In this post, I’m sharing some of my favorite animal crafts for kindergarten. Your students will love these hands-on learning activities!
Crafts can be such a powerful learning tool in the kindergarten classroom! Students are able to work on improving their hand strength and coordination as they color, cut and assemble different crafts. They are also able to practice following multi-step directions, since it’s important that they follow the assembly instructions in order for the craft to turn out. Finally, crafts can help you practice important academic skills in a way that keeps your students engaged and motivated.
Animal crafts are more than just adorable replications of our favorite critters. There are many different purposes that animal crafts can serve in your lesson planning throughout the year.
First, animal crafts can help you enhance your literacy instruction with read-aloud activities. There are so many great books featuring animals that you can use for read-alouds in your classroom. By adding a craft to the mix, students have a chance to reflect on the story. This is a great way to improve comprehension and build connections with the text!
After reading “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister, students can think about how they could be a good friend as they create their own rainbow fish craft.
This fun hermit crab craft is a fun way for students to practice retelling “A House for Hermit Crab” by Eric Carle.
If you learn about different animals in your classroom, you can use animal crafts as a way to enhance this instruction.
After learning many different facts about animals, students can choose their favorite fact and create a craft to go with it.
These crafts can make an interactive bulletin board, where people can lift the animal “cover” and read the facts underneath.
As you’ve seen in the activities I’ve already shared, you can include writing in the creation of animals crafts in your classroom.
Here are just a couple more ways that you can include an animal craft with a writing activity. For example, students can frame their writing in an animal craft or create an animal companion for their writing. Both of these options also look great on a bulletin board!
There are many different opportunities to include animal crafts during a fairy tale unit.
This Little Red Hen craft is the perfect way to help students practice story sequencing. Each flap of the hen’s apron includes an image from either the beginning, middle, or end of the story. Once students have figured out the sequence and assembled the craft, they can use this craft to help them retell the fairy tale.
This wolf craft is another example of how you can incorporate fairy tale crafts into your lesson planning. This is a great activity to complete with your students after reading Little Red Riding Hood together as a class.
As different holidays approach, the energy levels in the classroom seem to rise. You can help your students channel some of that excitement into a worthwhile craft activity!
This disguise-a-turkey craft is perfect for November! After reading “Turkey Trouble” together as a class, your students can craft a disguise for their turkeys.
As Christmas approaches, you could also incorporate a reindeer craft into your lesson plans.
Animal crafts can help your students practice other literacy skills in addition to the writing activities I’ve shared already.
For example, this “All About Bats” craft includes a labeling page. This is a great way for students to learn about some informational text elements! They are able to review important vocabulary as they add labels to the page.
In addition to literacy, animal crafts can help your students practice a variety of math skills.
This spider craft is a great way for students to review number sense! Each leg of the spider represents a different number. Students can then cut and paste the different representations of each number on the leg.
Here’s another fun example: Your students can review shapes as they put together an animal craft! Each part of this pig craft is a different shape. After creating the pig, students can then tally and graph the number of each shape that they used to build the craft. In addition to shape practice, students are also able to practice graphing and interpreting data.
I hope that this post has given you some inspiration for how to use animal crafts in your classroom.
If you’d like to incorporate more crafts into your daily lesson plans, I have great news! All of the crafts that I’ve pictured in this blog post are included in one easy-to-download resource. My Thematic Units Bundle is full of animal crafts that will keep your students busy all year long. In addition to the crafts, each thematic unit in the bundle has a variety of themed learning activities that you can use to create a fun learning experience for your students. I’ve even included a sample unit plan to help you map out the activities and save time on lesson planning.
If you’d like to take a look at all of the different units included in this bundle, you can click below to find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or in my TPT store.
Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find this post when you’re looking for kindergarten animal crafts.
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
