Observing Patterns in the Wild

We are back with another fun and educational activity for World Animal Day. This activity will be appropriate for preschoolers and above.

Observation – a skill that is very important for future learning. Yet, preschoolers have a tough time focusing on anything. Today, Big A and mom are going to observe animal skin patterns and spot the differences,

As mentioned before, Big A loves wildlife. When we want to talk about animals , that’s where we go.

• Animal pattern printable ( I made my own)
• Markers and crayons
• Printable of the animals you are observing

I made my own animal skin pattern using regular old MSPAINT. I hand drew the jaguar and leopard pattern - very hard ones.

Before starting, I just showed her the printed out black and white images of the animal skin patterns just to see of she had an idea of the animal. She got 4/5 right which was good. The last one jaguar vs leopard is a tough one for kids (and some adults too - I’m looking at you husband) We started with the tiger I printed out the tiger skin pattern printable I made on a cardstock paper. I made a very small pattern because of the lukewarm interest Big A shows towards coloring. If your kid loves to color you could make the pattern on an entire cardstock paper. Once we had my own pattern, we compared that to the printed out picture of the tiger. Big A started pointing out the colors. Skin is orange and the stripes are black. Great! She started to color while holding a conversation with me about tigers :What they eat, where they live and her love for the baby tigers. Her desire to keep a baby tiger as a pet since his teeth might not be that sharp as a mommy tiger. This is one of the reasons I love hands on activities with the kiddo’s : to listen to them talk. It’s amazing the things we hear when we listen to them, listen to their play, listen to their imagination. Next animal: Giraffe. We located the colors yellow and brown and she knew the places each color would go. Yellow on the skin and brown on the spots..

Moving on, we described the zebra’s pattern and I had her look if the zebra has a white body with black stripes or the black body with white stripes.

She came at me “Mom, I’m feeling dizzy looking at this zebra pattern” and was cracking up for a long time. She kept moving the zebra pattern paper away from eyes and towards her eyes and was being completely silly and goofy for a while. Anyway, the zebra question. Still under discussion all though strong evidence point towards black with white stripes.

Then Big A colored the very tiny pieces of jaguar and leopard patterns and we saw the rosettes had a black center on a Jaguar’s coat. All in all, we closely studied the colors and patterns on different animals’ skins. I think it is a great exercise for kids as it gets them to take a closer look at something they think they know.

• Observed that the skin patterns have various shape on them – lines, polygons, circles and ovals
• Observed the differences in colors on the patterns
• Observed the crucial difference between a jaguar’s pattern and a leopard’s pattern

Observation exercises seemed to be a good hit here. What can I say? She is one weird kid who loves worksheets(except coloring),workbooks and homework! I love it

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If you have a wildlife fan at home, you should check out Penny at Wildlife fun 4 kids.

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World Animal Day