Animal Habitat Sorting

I love my science area and this week we are learning all about forest animals. One of my favorite things to do when we are learning about habitats is to create two contrasting habitat playscapes on my science table and have my students dive right in and sort them. Animal habitat sorting is a great way to get children thinking about where animals live and is a perfect first step to thinking about WHY animals live where they do. Even before I gave an introductory lesson about forest animals yesterday I had this setup and students dove right into play. Why would I do that? As a way to assess as well as ignite any prior knowledge they have before we dive deeper into the content.

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How to set up your animal habitat sorting

Gather your materials. You will need some things to create your habitats like shells, a blue tray and mirror for the ocean, and woodblocks and play trees for the forest. I also printed out photos for each, along with the labels, and laminated them. I also added some text ” I love in the forest.” and “I live in the ocean.” Download that all for free here.

Oh, and you can’t leave out the most important part, the animals! I bought these exact sets for this activity. Forest animals and ocean animals.

Now it’s time to play.

Your students can simply sort or more likely like my students they will play with the animals after sorting too. Sorry about the blurry action shot!

After some discussion we decided we needed a river in the forest because we had beavers that needed to live in the water, but they don’t live in the ocean. So we added that!

Stay tuned for some more forest animal lessons. If you can’t wait and need more forest animal activities to do after this animal habitat sorting check out my printable activity pack below.