Animal Playtime!

As some of you might already know, my son is really into animals.  He can tell you about cool and unique creatures from every continent of the world, and has told me about all kinds of animals that I have never even heard of.  Colugos, hog-nosed bats, tarsiers, you name it.  We love his Animal Atlas, and I can honestly say that I have learned a lot reading it with him.  Don't you just love children's books that teach you something new, too?

The other day, it was disgustingly humid and swampy outside, so I was looking for things to do that would keep my children entertained inside.  My daughter requested play dough after breakfast, so I whipped up a batch of homemade "Pumpkin Spice Play Dough" (see recipe below), and she and my son set to work.  My son wandered off after half an hour or so (which is still pretty good for him), but my daughter sat there cutting and sculpting and creating for almost two hours.  I kid you not.  I kept debating whether or not to redirect her to something else, but she was so content and I just loved watching her experiment with everything that I just let her play on.  I jumped on the opportunity to clean my kitchen while they played, and came across a little plastic frog on the counter.  (Obviously.  Doesn't everyone have plastic frogs on their kitchen counter?  And tractor trailer trucks in their bathroom?)  I handed the frog to my daughter, who delightedly started hopping it all around and studying the tracks it made in the play dough.  My son heard her "ribbits" and came to see what she was doing.  Fortunately (and amazingly), I remembered that we had another whole collection of little hand-me-down plastic animals stored away upstairs.  Well, if those weren't the coolest, most exciting things my kids have played with in weeks, I don't know what was.  I'm not joking when I say that the combination of animals and play dough kept my kids entertained and playing for hours that day.  We're talking all morning, after lunch, and before and after dinner.  It was amazing!

They had so much fun and came up with so many creative ways to play with their animals and play dough that I thought I should share some of our "Animal Playtime" games with you.  Enjoy!

Guess That Footprint:

We love finding animal tracks when we are out and about exploring nature, so my son loved playing our own guessing game right here at home!  We took turns making the tracks and guessing which animal had left them. 

Fossil Finders:

After playing "Guess That Footprint" for a little while, I mentioned that some of the prints -- like that of the alligator whose body lies closer to the ground -- looked more like fossils than footprints.  With that, our game turned to "Fossil Finders."  I think my son liked this game even more than the first, but he had lots of fun playing both.  

                                     

(His zebra, cheetah, and alligator "fossils")

Animal Magic Squares:

My son loves doing a type of magic square puzzle on one of our dinosaur iPad apps (sometimes known as a "Fifteen puzzle.")  This puzzle consists of a 4x4 grid of 16 squares, where only one square of the puzzle is empty.  The other 15 squares contain pieces of a picture puzzle that has been shuffled up.  In order to solve it and finish the puzzle, the player must slide all of the pieces back to their proper location, one at a time, using the empty square.  The empty square strategically changes location around the board as the other pieces are moved back into their correct positions.  It's a little like chess, in that you sometimes have to think ahead a few moves to figure out how best to move your pieces.  (I feel like I'm not doing a very good job of explaining it.  It is much easier to understand if you can see it in action, so I'll try to explain a bit under the picture below.)  Anyway, as I was tending to my daughter and her activities at one point, I looked over to see my son setting up the animals and making up his own little version of a magic square puzzle.  "See," he said, "It's just like my dinosaur game!" He took two tigers and lined them up on opposite sides, then proceeded to slide the animals around until the two tigers were right next to each other.  I would have never thought to do that.  Don't you just love what those little minds can think up?

(The top four animals slide right one space starting with the cheetah, then the elephant slides down to where the tiger was, the other cheetah slides over, the tiger slides up, etc.  I'm not sure how he moved them from there, but after several moves, tiger one was a little bit closer to tiger two. 

A few more moves, and he was there!)

Animal Classification Game:

While my son was busy with his animal magic squares, I decided to set up another game for him to play.  I sorted the animals into two groups and, once he was ready to play something else, asked my him to figure out what the two groups had in common and how they were different from each other.  There were several possible answers with the setup I had, but the one I had in mind was carnivores vs. herbivores.  

                                     

I loved seeing what ideas my son had and how he sorted it out along the way.  At first he said, "Well, they all live in Africa... so that's not it.  And these ones all like to play in the mud... But I don't know if zebras really like to play in the mud.  (Pausing.)  (Thinking.)  These ones (the other group) all have fur... (Thinking.) But so does the zebra..." And so it went.  Eventually, he correctly observed that one group was all cats, and after I told him there was even something else they all had in common that had to do with what they ate, he figured it out.  He then set off sorting them by color, where they lived, their size... There are all kinds of fun possibilities!

                                     

Animals Around the World:

When he had moved on from our sorting game, my son went back to making footprints in the play dough.  As he was pressing on one bit of dough and shaping it a bit, he stopped, looked down, and said, "Hey!  This looks like Australia!" (And then he promptly broke off a little piece to be Tasmania down off the bottom.  That's my boy!)  We started to look around to see if we had any Australian animals in our little collection.  He decided to pretend that the black bear was a Tasmanian Devil, a little gray cat was a koala, an ostrich was an emu, and a skunk was a dingo.  He even tried to put some animals where they geographically belong, like the crocodile up in the north and a snake in the outback desert. 

While he set up Australia, I made a little play dough Africa.  He couldn't wait to set up his savanna, as we have a good number of African creatures in our plastic animal set.

He was so excited to put his pair of lemurs on Madagascar!

 Next up, South America!

(That orange cat is very versatile.  On Africa, it was a hyena.  On South America, it was an ocelot.  

The antelope there is posing as a llama.)

Above is our final set up, including tigers and elephants on India and one of his personal favorites, two orangutans on the island of Borneo.  (We have Wild Kratts to thank for that little tidbit of knowledge.)

Recommended Reading:

We have several books to thank for my son's fascination with and knowledge of so many of the world's animals.  As I mentioned above, the Animal Atlas is definitely his favorite, but these others are also fabulous:

• The Barefoot Books World Atlas
• We're Roaming in the Rainforest
• Over In the Ocean: In a Coral Reef
• Over in the Jungle: A Rainforest Rhyme
• Animalia
• The Water Hole

Happy reading and playing!

Pumpkin Spice Play Dough: 

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
• generous sprinkle of cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 cup water
• orange food coloring (I've heard sugar-free kool-aid packets also work well for this)

Mix dry ingredients in a pan.  Add water and oil and mix well. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for two minutes or until the dough has formed into a big ball.  Remove from stove and knead for 5 minutes or so, adding food coloring or kool aid as you go.  Cool, play and enjoy!

Dough is best stored in a ziploc bag or covered plastic container.  

Thanks to Mommyfootprint for the dough recipe!

Another one of our favorite play dough recipes is here, if you prefer a no-cook version.  I highly recommend adding the food coloring to the water to help avoid staining your hands as you knead.  I also suggest adding a little bit of water at a time until you have the right consistency.  I added the whole two cups right away and ended up needing to add a lot more flour, oil, and salt to get it right.  Thanks, The Imagination Tree, for another great recipe!