We have recently been going through a bit of an animal life cycle craze. The kids already knew a lot about different animal life cycles but they have been asking more and more questions and we have been reading more and more books about it, so we thought it would be fun to make our own life cycle book.
We have kept it simple as my youngest wanted to join in, so lots of cutting and sticking pictures and a bit of writing key words. We have also left pages free in-between the different animal life cycle diagrams so that the kids can come back and add their own diagrams or notes as they want. It is still very much a work in progress but I thought I would share what we have done so far. We have used a number of different pages, all are Free pages from Twinkl so I am going to list them at the end of the post.
For every animal that we do we start off by setting up a page in our book with the basic template as below and we normally read up a bit about each animal.
Then the kids cut out the pictures and decide in which order they should go.
We are only making one book so they kids are making the book together as a team. They both do the cutting out, then my youngest normally gets to do the sticking and my oldest will label the pictures (I am not making a big deal about any spelling errors).
It has been a very relaxed project and both kids are enjoying it as we add to the book bit by bit and they are in charge of the book. They have now given me a list of future animals that they want to include in the book and I have been tasked with finding some pages for them to use.
To encourage my youngest to join in with the writing side of things I have also printed out some the general life cycle words for him, he has yet to add any of his own writing but he has been reading the words on the cards (with a bit of big sister help).
And we even found this cute frog life cycle folding aid which we have added.
I really enjoy this kind of relaxed learning with the kids. I definitely find when I am relaxed they both end up trying more and they get more and more involved with the project.
My son informed my earlier today that next week he is going to draw a snake life cycle in the book and apparently his sister is going to do a lizard drawing in the book – I can’t wait to see these additions to our little life cycle book.
Here is the list of all the pages that we have used so far (all FREE from Twinkl)
sea turtle life cycle worksheet
ofamily learning together 
How nice to create something together!
LikeLike