A Zoo-pendous Time!

Every spring we take a field trip to the Fort Worth zoo. A few weeks before we go, we learn about different zoo animals. We learn about their needs, about living and non-living, and about an animal's dependency on the earth and their environment.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

We read the book If Anything Ever Goes Wrong at the Zoo by Mary Jean Hendrick. Then we write about what we would do if anything went wrong at the zoo.





we brought stuffed zoo animals to school and used them for all kinds of math activities



we compared elephants in fiction books to real elephants- I teach my students to draw animals and people by using shapes for the body parts- this makes it easier for them to draw- we also draw pictures step by step and together for the first part of the school year, after awhile the students get very good at drawing and they are able to draw with very little direction- we use a writing program that stresses teaching students to draw with detail so that it will carry over into their writing and they will write with lots of detail- we use Write From the Beginning


monkeying around with math- monkey subtraction





our zoo animal mural- we made the animals from TLC lessons, makinglearningfun.com, and patterns we traced




We brainstormed ideas for what different zoo animals would say if they could talk. We learned about using quotation marks in our writing.