We have recently been having some fun learning about African animals.  We have done a number of activities on this theme before but the kids always seem to enjoy it so we often end up coming back to it.

I started off by creating a little African animal world in the corner of our lounge.

The background picture is printed off Twinkl (Platinum) safari small world background.  I stuck some plain green paper on the bottom of the box and added some green shredded paper.  The animals and the tree where all existing toys out of the kids playbox.

As the kids played so they added their own animals and bits and pieces

My daughter added her own labels for the animals

The safari labels and the  african animal word mat that my daughter used are FREE to download from Twinkl.

My son had his own idea about his african world.  We have been reading a lot lately about dinosaurs and he thought that a meteorite should land in the african animal world.  With the result being…………………..

But that is one of the reason that I love setting up these little play areas for the kids.  They always find fun and creative ways to play with them.  And we always end up talking about new and interesting topics.  With my son we discussed which animals are carnivores and herbivores and who would win in a fight a lion or a T-Rex while my daughter was very much animal group classification focussed.

We managed to quickly print off these great classification posters and we discussed which animals would go into which group. Animal group posters (Twinkl have recently updated these posters so they do not look identical to the ones in the photos)

We also found these great African animal masks on Twinkl (gold).

The kids had a great time making the animal noises and we even played a game where the kids would try to move like the animal mask that they where wearing.  Both kids really enjoyed the masks and they tied nicely in with the South African readers that my daughter has been reading called the cub series.  It is all about this little lion cub Lucas and his animal friends and what they get up to.

I also used the opportunity to practice some of our number words.  My daughter has been learning how to spell the number words for 11 to 20.  To start off with I wrote the words on the editable safari labels and then she needed to match the labels with the picture of the animal and write the correct number.  We then reversed the activity where I wrote the numbers and she then had to write the matching words.  The labels we used are the editable safari labels (the same ones my daughter used above) and we used these safari animal posters (I printed 4 to a page).  I choose the editable version so that we could laminate them and use them to write numbers and or words on them.  But you can also download them with the numbers already printed on.

My son has also been doing these great african animal themed maths puzzles.

And we still have a bunch more African themed activities lined up including some more art projects.  If you missed my earlier post we recently did a fun activity using some african animal stencils – here is the post African animal stencil pictures.