For students who need a more challenge, they must write complete sentences. For struggling students, they simply draw and label.

I like to have students compare a mother animal and a baby animal using an interactive journal (seen on the left). These are PERFECT for when students are ready to become a little more independent. Interactive Animal Mothers and Babies Journals You can easily differentiate this activity by having students draw, label or even write complete sentences. I love the freedom that it gives me as a teacher to lead the discussion where I need it to go, but I also love that it gives students an opportunity to get really creative. I love using prompts like the one you see on the left on the “Mothers and Babies” worksheet. This is a great opportunity to informally start comparing how young animals look like their parents (coloration, number of limbs and body structure).

The best way to start this unit on Animal Mothers and Babies is to do a simple matching activity where you match a picture of the young animal with the mother animal. These activities are completed at the beginning of the unit when students are just starting to build their knowledge base, so these activities might seem easy, but remember, they are BUILDING their knowledge on the subject. We are then recording that new information on a simple recording sheet. This is where I introduce new vocabulary and I am “guiding” students through books or videos to find new information. Okay, “Guided Research” sounds like a super formal term… but what it really means is that these are the activities that we do together as a class and there is typically a right or wrong answer. Or, depending on the level of your group, you could try adding the Extension Set, but use the structure “Baby cow” to focus more on the words for the adult animals.Learning the Facts about Animal Mothers and Babies With 5 year-olds, you can use the Basic Set but teach them the real words for the baby animals. With these ages I like to give them lots of opportunities for reading in English, so if they can’t remember all the animal names they can just read them from the cards! With my 6-7 year olds I add the Extension cards, so they are playing with 22 cards in total.

With my 5 year olds, I usually use the Basic Set, but teach them the actual names of the baby animals. I also find it better to teach them “baby cow” instead of “calf” at this age – it’s easier for them to remember and gives them more practise with the basic farm animal vocabulary I want to teach. With my 3-4 year olds, I use the Basic set of 12 cards – this set includes the 6 “common” farm animals, so they are not saturated with vocabulary. PLEASE SEE OUR RETURNS POLICY BEFORE PURCHASING.Īs I teach different age groups, I wanted a game that I could easily adapt for their different levels. For an explanation of how I use these cards with my kids in class, see below! They are also FULLY EDITABLE, so you can easily change the text from U.S English to British English.

They would make a great addition to Farm Animal units and centres or even as a cute Mother’s Day activity! The cards are large and bright, specially designed to appeal to little ones. This FARM ANIMALS AND THEIR BABIES pack includes 4 sets of cards in both colour and black line, with Basic and Extension sets so you can choose which best suits your class needs! You can adapt them to large or small groups, and choose which skills you want to focus on – use the sets with animal names if you want to help reinforce reading, or the sets without names if you want to focus on vocabulary recall. I Have – Who Has? games are fun way to teach and review vocabulary and question structures in your preschool, kindergarten or ESL classroom! They are low-prep and also work great as time-filler activities.

Mommy and baby animal matching game