As with all early years projects, any topic on animals needs to build on children's existing knowledge, experiences and interests. While young children may have seen a wonderful array of animals on TV, video and in books, they may have limited experience of real animals. So, organising visits for children to meet live animals is a good starting point (see 'Visiting hours', page 6). Alternatively, start your project with the minibeasts and birds that live in or visit your outdoor area (see 'It's a bug's life', page 8 and 'On a wing', page 10).
Planning
While planning the project, you will need to consider:
* how to encourage the children to observe animals closely (see pages 7 and 8-9) - an essential ability if children are to develop their scientific understanding of animal life
* how to teach the children to handle animals with care and to respect their needs (see pages 7 and 17)
* what information they want the children to learn about animals
* how children and practitioners view animals. Will any visiting bunny receive an over-enthusiastic welcome from the children? Will any cockroach be met by screams from the staff? Are some of the children scared of dogs? (see pages 7 and 17)
* health and hygiene, and the need to tell children to always wash their hands after touching animals.
Facts and figures
Through a project on animals, children can come to appreciate that:
* anything that is alive that is not a plant is an animal.
* there are many different kinds of animals in the world, and various classes of animal, including birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.
* all animals need food and water to live. Some animals eat plants, some eat meat, and some eat both. Animals get their food in lots of different ways: pets, working animals and zoo animals are given food, cows eat grass, giraffes eat leaves, frogs catch flies, worms ingest earth under the ground, ducks eat weeds under water, kittens suckle from their mothers.
* animals are born in different ways: baby birds hatch and have no feathers, kittens are blind and lots are born at once, spiders hatch hundreds of little spiders, frogs lay frogspawn which turn into tadpoles.
* animals have different kinds of skins and make different noises. They move in different ways and live in different kinds of homes.
* some animals are invented, such as dragons and unicorns, and some animals are now extinct, such as the dodo and dinosaurs.
Role play
An animal project offers many opportunities for consolidating and extending children's learning through role play and small-world play, for example, the vet's, a pet shop, a farm.
Visits, videos and reference and storybooks can all provide great stimuli for such role play and practitioners can enhance the children's play by:
* providing real-life props, such as real binoculars and magnifying glasses
* developing linked role-play areas. For example, link the safari park with a hotel or camp to stay in overnight, and a visitors' centre with information about the park. In this way, children can move from one area to another, extending the play purposefully in different ways, in a complete role-play environment.
* introducing a problem to be solved. For example, 'We don't know how to get to where the lions are. We need a map to guide us.'
* joining in with the children's play and inventing scenarios that involve decision-making, discussion and opportunities for the children to be 'apprentices', learning from the adult example. For example, plan to go on a safari. When will it start? How long will it last? How will you travel? What will you need to pack? (See pages 12-13.) Sheila Ebbutt is managing director and Carole Skinner is product development manager of BEAM Education, a specialist mathematics education publisher, dedicated to promoting the teaching and learning of mathematics as interesting, challenging and enjoyable (tel: 020 7684 3223)
