Local Animal Planet

Maria – 1y.4m.

As far as I know babies are very keen on studying animals: the first words they start to pronounce are often sounds of various fauna representatives (Moo! Oink! Baa! Mew! Coo!), they love to play with animal toys, they like to recognize familiar animals and study new ones in the books. The culmination most probably is Zoo visit, where they can see all animals in their “close to natural habitat” doing their own business: eating, sleeping, walking etc.

So, in September we decided to have an animal week. Throughout the whole week together with Maria we have been studying as many animals as we could, recalled their sounds, read books about them.

To ease and to make our "studies" more interesting I prepared home zoo. In every window somebody lives: tiger, zebra, owl… I also wrote the names of each one. Of course, Mary cannot read yet, but this was done with the perspective and with the intention that she gets used to the letters. At first it was interesting for her just to open windows, then I asked her to find this or that animal and later she tried to name every animal.

We added a bit of creative work to make our learning even more interesting and efficient. We made a giraffe out of various kinds of cereal, which in an easy and efficient manner develops fingers. Maria evidently enjoyed this so much that she played with the cereal for quite a while after we finished our “masterpiece”.

Our animal week was marked by the discovering the world of Real animals in local zoo! It was a fountain of emotions! Our baby girl was really astonished to see all animals in real!