Animals
A Fox and a Mouse Short Film
This is a short film about the unlikely friendship between a fox and a mouse. It is a nice way to introduce a new topic on animals and after your KS1 class watch the short film, ask them a range of questions.
Q: What animals were in the film? Do you know anything about these animals?
-How they look, where they live, what they eat, the name of their babies etc.
Q: What time of year is this film set and why?
Q: What is difficult about this time of year for animals?
Q: After seeing the mouse fall from the branch, what did you think was going to happen?
Q: After mouse falls into the water, what do we learn about fox?
Q: Why do you think fox decides that he doesn’t want to eat the mouse at the end?
Q: Who are the villains in the story?
Q: What do you think happened next?
Once you have discussed the short film, it is now time to see what the children know about animals, what’s their favourite animal, pets they may have, looking after animals etc.
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Main Focus: A Bird's Nest
This is a KS1 resource that is useful when exploring animals and their homes.
This resource focuses on birds and what materials birds use to builds nests. We have created a simple piece of writing with multiple choice questions for the first activity.
Once your children have completed the first activity, they will make their own nest using natural and man-made materials.
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Main Focus: Busy Bees
This is a lovely resource that explores the process of bees making honey.
Your Year 1 / Year 2 class will explore key terminology such as pollen, nectar, honeycombs and beeswax. They will also explore the different types of bees and their roles within the hive.
We have included a multiple choice activity to test the understanding of your class. We have also included a resource that encourages your class to write a little but about each images to show key elements of the honey making process.
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Main Focus: The Seasons
This is a useful resource for Year 1 and Year 2 classes to learn a little bit about the seasons in the UK.
Your class will read the paragraphs or sentences and add in the correct word to complete the sentences. This resource has been differentiated to cater for KS1 classes.
Your class will learn key terms and physical changes that occur during spring, summer, autumn and winter months.
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Main Focus: Materials and Water
This is a resource that focuses on materials that are waterproof, resistant and absorbent.
Your class will learnt the differences between each and complete the activity.
This activity lays the foundations for the next activity linked to animals and water.
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Main Focus: Water and Animals
This is an interesting resource aimed at Ks1 classes that explores how crocodiles have waterproof skin, beavers have waterproof fur (because of oils) and a cormorant has absorbent feathers.
Once your class has read the short paragraphs of information, they can then show you what they have learned in their own words about these three animals.
Finally, your class will complete a waxy artwork activity.
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Main Focus: Mixing Liquids
In the previous resource we looked at how the beaver had oily fur and that made it waterproof to a certain degree.
In this experiment, your class are going to see how the science behind that actually works and recognise that water, food colouring and oil cannot mix and directly make comparisons when food colouring is mixed with water compared to oil.
Oh and by the way… this looks awesome!
Equipment
- Food colouring
- Pipette
- Cooking oil
- Water
- Two glasses
Once the experiment is complete, get a fresh glass of clear water, mix both glasses together and slowly watch the oil gather at the top and watch the food colouring slowly drift downwards and mix with the water below.
Main Focus: Animals and Camouflage
Firstly, your class will use the word bank to generate a sentence or two that explains what camouflage is.
The words we have chosen are: camouflage, blend, pattern, hunt, surroundings, colour, hide, disguise, environment, avoid and protect.
This activity gives each child the opportunity to showcase their knowledge and ability to construct informative sentences.
The second activity involves your class watching a video resource called ‘Hide and Seek’ – a video about animals and camouflage. As your class watch the video, they will tick off the animals as they learn about them.
Finally, I have included an art activity that uses leaves to create different animals. it would be best to stick these onto card that is a similar colour to the leaves. Allow children to choose and modify their card to suit. Of course, these are ideas and your Year 1 / Year 2 children can come up with their own.
Main Focus: Nocturnal Animals
This is a resource linked to nocturnal animals. Nocturnal animals are active at night and sleep during the day.
Your class will read the snippets of information about some chosen nocturnal animals and then match the information to the pictures to see what they have retained.
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Main Focus: Bat Experiment
Once your Year 1 / Year 2 class have completed the activity above, they will then design and create their very own flying bat using the pictures. Visually, it is quite easy to create using pictures, so we haven’t included instructions. You can ask you class to write instructions if you like. We have also included a page at the end to see what STEM concepts your class have learned by completing this experiment.
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