Where do animals live? This habitat activity for preschool is a fun way to talk to your students about where animals live. You can use these free printables as mats at a science center or on a magnet board. In my 3 year old classroom, I popped these printables up on the magnet board and added some animal magnets. We had fun placing the animals in the right habitats. We also loved being goofy and thinking about how a zebra or giraffe would live under the sea!

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Animal Habitat Sorting

Gather your materials. You will need these animal habitat printables ( print for free here) some animal magnets like these if you are using this as a magnet board activity, or animal figurines like these for the mats. Also, if you are making mats you may want to laminate the printables, so you’ll need some laminating sheets and a laminator.  If you are doing this as a mat activity, try using these tiny figurines as you can fit many on these little mats and manipulating them can be a good sort of challenge for preschoolers.

Start by printing the mats out ( print here) 

You can place 2, 3 or all 4 mats out depending on how challenging you want this activity to be. In my classroom, I placed three habitats out but when my neighbor ( who is a little older than my students) came by and we worked on this together we did all four.

Classifying is a wonderful activity, one of the fun things about doing this on the magnet board was that the children talked to each other. They were silly about placing the zebra and the lion in under the sea and the seal in the African Savanah with the elephant. Being silly together build bonds and we want to build those bonds and feelings of belonging.

It was social and they weren’t just building classifying skills by looking at the animals and thinking about the habitats they were building social and language skills too. That’s my goal as a teacher to find activities that can do this.

More Preschool Science

For more great preschool science activities check out our archive!