Preschool Pond Animal Craft & Acting Game
Pond Animals
This preschool pond crafts and game is the third in a three part series about animals that live on or near the pond. For complete coverage of the Down by the Pond subject matter, use the first two lesson plans in the series to develop knowledge about various pond animals, their sounds and the homes they live in. Use the lesson plan for these preschool pond crafts and game to help children understand that different types of animals live in different types of places.
Children do not need knowledge of where the other animals live, but they do need the knowledge of the pond animals for this preschool pond crafts and game lesson plan. After completing the first two lesson plans in this series, you may want to again review the book Down by the Pond with your children to refresh their memories of animals that live on or around the pond.
Crafts and Game
To do this project, you enough animal masks so that each child can make and decorate a different animal. Obviously since this is a Down by the Pond lesson plan, some of these should be animals that live down by the pond. If you do not have animal masks for the students to make and decorate, the coloring pages on this animal coloring pages site could be easily adapted for use as masks.
Give each student a different animal to color and decorate. After students have colored their masks, collect the masks and put them in a pile. Ask students to come up one at a time and pick a mask to wear. They should not show their mask to the class. Help students to act out the sounds and actions of the animal represented by the mask they are holding, while the rest of the class tries to guess what animal the students is acting out. Once students guess the animal, the student with the mask can put their mask on. Then, the entire class should decide together if the animal lives by the pond.
Give each student a turn at picking a mask and acting out an animal. When this activity is complete, students will be able to identify what animals live down by the pond and what animals don’t. To promote cooperative learning on this project, feel free divide students up into groups that work together and give them points for each time they get the animal right. Students may take their masks home at the end of the day, or you may wish to keep the masks at school so that the children can utilize this preschool ponds crafts and game over and over again.
This post is part of the series: Preschool Theme: Down by the Pond
This is a series of lesson plans that was created to teach children about different types of animals even as they develop large motor skills, fine motor skills and cooperative learning skills.
