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Who doesn’t love learning about animals in the wild? Kids of all ages (and adults, too!) have endless curiosity about the motley of creatures that sprint, slither, and stomp through the animal kingdom.

Here are 7 playful, hands-on activities to help your kids learn more about the cool wildlife on our planet!

1) Be Our Guest

Make an animal hotel out of materials around your house! Give your child the name of imaginary hotel for a specific animal. Some possibilities include:

• The Monkey Motel
• The Racoon Resort
• The Hippo Hotel
• The Iguana Inn
• The Bumblebee Bed & Breakfast

Help your child research their animal and consider:

• What kind of beds would they need at their hotel?
• What food would they serve?
• How can they make their guests comfortable?

Then, go on a scavenger hunt around your house for art materials! Create the hotel structure using a shoebox, cardboard boxes, or even fallen twigs from your backyard. Encourage your child to get creative with their ideas and materials.

As you create together, ask your child what they think might happen at their hotel. Who runs the hotel? Can they name their guests? See what imaginative stories emerge!

2) Get Crafty

Toilet paper rolls, paper plates, egg cartons, and paper bags are budget-friendly materials to create artistic, kid-friendly versions of different animals.

Here are some ideas for materials (and a few free printables) to get your kids in the creative spirit!

• Use leftover toilet paper rolls to create our Paper Tube Animals.

• Use cotton balls and string to make our cute Tailorbird Nest.

• Grab a brown paper bag to make our Bunny Headbands.
• Use a small clay pot to build our Pop-Up Groundhog.
• Find some gray construction paper to make our Whale Paper Mitt Puppet.
• Repurpose an egg carton to craft a caterpillar’s body or a turtle’s shell.
• Pick up a paper plate to make a paper plate snail or lion.

As you craft together, share fun facts about the animal with your child. (For example, did you know that elephants can’t jump?)

Looking for ready-made art shapes to create animal-themed crafts? Check out Evan-Moor’s Animals: Amazing Earth Adventures and Activities, Ages 6–7.

3) Shape a Story

Get your kids excited to write about animals with charming shape activities!

Is your child enchanted with elephants? Use our free Elephant Shape Book lesson to get them to share what they know about the gentle giants.

Does your child wish they could wave to a whale? Our free Whale Shape book lesson will help them write about some of the world’s biggest animals.

4) Share a Story

For children, animals are the perfect main characters to kickstart their own creative tale.

Invite your child to tell or write you a story about:

• A polar bear that gets lost
• An orca who swims to Mexico
• A penguin that makes a friend

Encourage them to use as many real-world details as they can in their story.

5) Off to the Races

Assign your child an animal. They must now run and walk exactly like this animal! If your child is unfamiliar with the animal, look up videos online so they can mimic the animal’s gait.

Then, choose your own animal form and challenge your child to a race! Some fun race pairs include:

• Tortoise vs. Hare
• Elephant vs. Cheetah
• Duck vs. Monkey
• Rabbit vs. Dolphin
• Polar Bear vs. Frog

6) What’s Longest?

Give your kids a list of animals and ask them to rank which animals they think are the longest.

Next, grab a measuring tape, head to a large field, and measure out the length of these long-limbed animals for a fun outdoor activity.

• Komodo dragon (world’s longest lizard): 10 feet (3 meters) long
• Reticulated python (world’s longest snake): 33 feet (10 meters) long (the longest ever recorded)
• Whale shark (world’s longest fish): 59 feet (18 meters) long
• Blue whale (world’s longest whale): 98 feet (30 meters) long

7) Wildlife Wander

Go for a ‘wildlife wander’ on a nearby nature trail. Challenge your child to find as many examples of wildlife as possible.

Encourage your child to listen for birds, spot an insect, or narrow in on a squirrel. Keep a journal to track which animals make multiple appearances on your wildlife wanders.

Learning about animals is guaranteed to cue up your child’s curiosity! Want to dive deeper into the animal world? Evan-Moor’s brand-new activity book, Animals: Amazing Earth Adventures and Activities, features photos, step-by-step drawing, dot-to-dots, and more fun activities to help your child travel around the world while practicing basic skills like writing, solving problems, patterning, and more. (Be sure to grab the Tailorbird Nest craft above!) Activity books are available for ages 4–11.

In today’s online world with so many ways of capturing language, handwriting might seem outmoded. However, handwriting has a huge benefit that may not be obvious. It is a key element in other parts of language literacy, such as reading and spelling. In fact, the act of forming letters helps the brain develop. It strengthens recognition of letters and their sounds. Handwriting connects muscle memory with what we see and hear. Processing letters by forming them with our hands, physically, helps solidify words in our brain.

Why is Handwriting So Important? Handwriting practice is useful for much more than handwriting. The motor control used in the fingers, hand, and arm while writing transfers to other physical skills that children may need, such as using buttons or tools; playing a cards, a musical instrument, or a video game; tying shoelaces; or braiding hair. In addition, most arts and crafts and some sports rely on hand control. A wide range of professions, such as electrician, mechanic, baker, dentist, or surgeon require manual dexterity as well. Both cursive and printing increase retention of information over typing, and both make the brain ready for deeper learning. Every part of the brain is engaged in handwriting, which requires recognition, recall, spatial skills, and muscle coordination.

How to Teach Your Child Handwriting Like most learning, handwriting happens in stages. The youngest learners are learning to control a pencil and make intentional marks. Kids naturally want to doodle, make pictures, and imitate adults. Channeling their scribble energy into tracing or completing pictures makes repetition fun. Practice makes progress! Use handwriting practice sheets to learn the different strokes needed to make letters. Once your learner has basic control, challenge him or her to practice tracing, completing, or writing funny or meaningful words and names in fun tasks. Encourage your child to say each letter’s sound while writing it to reinforce the sound-symbol relationship and say each whole word at the end. After completing a sentence, have your child read it, or read it aloud yourself to reinforce that writing is communication, just like talking.

Teaching Cursive Handwriting

Just like learning to print, it is helpful to practice the strokes or shapes used to make cursive letters.

The next step after strokes are familiar is to practice cursive letters. As with manuscript letters, grouping cursive letters that start the same way or have the same strokes can be very efficient. An additional step for learning cursive is the joining of the letters. Since the letters don’t start and end in the same places, it’s important to focus on the joining of letters into words. Using a handwriting cursive workbook with silly sentences or fun facts makes practice a breeze.

Additional Handwriting Tips for Parents

• Get unlimited use out of each handwriting practice sheet that you use by putting it in a clear plastic sleeve. Have your child write with a dry-erase marker on the plastic sleeve. Wipe off the writing afterward with felt and insert another page.
• Encourage a consistent, comfortable grip. Your child’s hand should be relaxed and not pressing too hard on the paper. Keeping the pencil point sharp also helps keep the pressure appropriate.
• To strengthen and improve your child’s fine motor skills and dexterity, have your child pick up paper clips, toothpicks, cotton balls, or coins; cut shapes out of paper; or knit or crochet.
• Tilt the paper to the left for right-handers and to the right for left-handers. Make sure children can see what they are writing and can move their hand across the page easily.
• Left-handers should adjust the strokes for cross pieces, such as in t, f, and some capital letters, so that they pull the pencil toward their writing hand.
• Some tools can help beginning writers:
  
  • for grip: A rubber grip slides onto the pencil and guides finger placement.
  • for posture: A slant board keeps the paper at a good angle to discourage slouching.

Fun Game and Activity Ideas

Augment current games: Get more out of any standard word-based commercial game by offering players additional game points for writing out any words they form. Sidewalk/sand art: Have your child brainstorm words to illustrate or positive words of encouragement. Give your kids chalk and to write the words on the ground and decorate them. Or if you are at the beach or have a sandbox, have them write and draw in the sand. Air writing: Play charades but write a word in the air, one letter at a time, instead of acting out words. The “writer” indicates how many letters are in the word and then draws each letter in the air as players guess each letter and the word as well. The winner of the round becomes the next “writer.” Foggy mirror message: After a shower or bath, have your child write a word or short message in the fog on the mirror.

Additional Resources:

For full-color activity books with handwriting practice sheets, check out Evan-Moor’s Handwriting Fun and Handwriting Fun! Cursive.

For a classroom or homeschool reproducible resource, check out the all-in-one Handwriting: Manuscript and Cursive practice book and e-book.

Kathy Jorgensen has been an educator most of her life, starting as a peer tutor in second grade and tutoring her way through high school and college. After teaching grades 2 through 12, she spent two decades editing standardized tests. Kathy happily returned to her teaching roots, providing instruction and practice in Evan-Moor’s math and science products. When she’s not polishing words on the page, Kathy is flitting down the dance floor indulging her passion for Scottish country dancing as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher.

Every kid is a natural storyteller, but many struggle to get their pencils to paper. A great writing activity is one that inspires kids to write down their big and wonderful ideas—while also sneaking in essential writing practice!

Here are 8 fun writing prompts, games, and projects to help kids in Grades 4-6 get engaged and enthusiastic about writing.

1) Alphabet Autobiography

An autobiography tells the story of someone—and that someone is you! An alphabet autobiography is a unique way for students to share details about themselves.

Ask students to write the letters of the alphabet on the left-side of their page. Then, prompt them to write a sentence with a personal detail for each letter.

For example:

• A is for apple pie. I make it every November with my mom for Thanksgiving!

2) Paired Dialogue

Pair up students, and ask them to share a piece of paper. Give each pair a starting line of dialogue. One student writes the first line of dialogue and passes it to the other student. The other student writes a second line in response, and then returns the paper to the first student.

Students can only “talk” on paper—not out loud! At the end, you can ask them to read their dialogue out loud.

Some starting lines:

• “Hold on, do you know how to drive this thing?”
• “Wait, what’s that in your bag?”
• “Why are you in that tree?”

3) A New Point of View

Ask kids to choose an inanimate object and imagine the world from that object’s perspective. Give your students the title, “Life as a _____.”

Some fun objects to write about include refrigerators, toasters, pencils, windows, and chairs… or anything that inspires kids to see the world through different “eyes.”

4) Restaurant Reviews

Writing that’s applicable to real life can encourage reluctant writers to pick up their pens. Ask your students to write a review of their favorite restaurant. Use these questions to get them started:

• What did they eat?
• What did they like?
• What didn’t they like?
• How did the restaurant feel?

Learn more about our real-world writing activities here.

5) Nature Notes

Go on a walk in nature and compile “Nature Notes.” Encourage students to notice details around them using their five senses. Try using questions from the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise:

• What are five things I SEE?
• What are four things I HEAR?
• What are three things I can TOUCH?
• What are two things I SMELL?
• What is one thing I TASTE?

6) Letters to Your Future Self

Ask students to write to themselves in the future. Seal up their notes, and then return their letters to them at the end of the school year.

Ask them to answer:

• What are you grateful for right now?
• What are you excited about?
• What do you think will change this year?
• Write three predictions.

7) Local Hero Biographies

Ask students to write a biography of an unexpected local hero, like the cheerful barista at the coffee shop. Discover our 6 steps to teach kids how to write a biography here.

8) How-To Directions

Everyone likes to give directions about their favorite activities! Ask students to write “how-to” paragraphs about:

• How to Clean a Room
• How to Clean a Pet’s Cage
• How to Make an Ice-Cream Sundae
• How to Eat a Potato
• How to Make a Friend
• How to Grow a Garden
• How to Tell a Joke

Download our free printables to help your students write a “how-to” paragraph.

Most of the time, kids just need a starting point to get into the writing spirit. If you can engage your kids in a writing activity or project that lights up their imagination, their pencils are guaranteed to dance across their page. Want more writing activities? Writing Fabulous Sentences & Paragraphs, Grades 4-6 features lively, creative, and scaffolded lessons to help young students become strong and confident authors.

Monika Davies is a freelance author of over 60 books for kids and a writing workshop facilitator for adult-sized writers. She’s passionate about writing and creating learning material that is playful, informative, and sparks curiosity for all readers.