Listening to animal noises will deepen children's knowledge of the animal world and improve their listening skills.
Listen with the children to high-quality recordings of animal noises so that they can hear accurately the different sounds. Include a wide variety of animals, such as farm animals, birds and rainforest and African animals.
Listen to the sounds in a quiet area and encourage the children to concentrate. Many children are slow to develop listening skills and struggle particularly when there is a lot of extraneous noise.
Encourage the children to imitate the sounds that they hear and try imitating the noises yourself. When you tell a story or sing a song with animals in it, try to imitate the true sound of the animal. Many books and songs use terms such as 'bow wow' and 'cock-a-doodle-do', which are lovely descriptive words but fail to accurately describe the sounds.
Why and how Explain that animals make sounds for various reasons. Some make sounds only rarely and usually when in danger. Rabbits, for example, make a cry like a bark and bang their back legs on the ground when in extreme danger. A tortoise can hiss if annoyed. Cats and dogs make different noises when happy, in pain and in danger. Try to show video clips of the same animal making different noises for different reasons. Also draw the children's attention to how the animals make these noises. Are they all made through the mouth?
Explain that minibeasts have no 'voices' and, instead, make sounds with other parts of their bodies. Bees and flies buzz by vibrating their wings, grasshoppers rub one wing against the other. Some beetles tap their heads against their burrows, cockroaches hiss by blowing air out of a narrow hole in their bodies.
Make an insect orchestra with different instruments, such as scrapers, claves, drums, maracas, sand blocks, rhythm sticks and castanets. Discuss how the children can play each musical instrument in various ways to produce different sounds - loud and soft, long and short and high and low notes.
Talk about the different movements you need to make to produce a sound: shaking, scraping, rattling, hitting, rubbing. Relate this to insect sounds.
Vocabulary
Introduce animal noise vocabulary such as squawk, screech, chirp, croak, roar, growl, bark, low, neigh, grunt, miaow, whinny, crow, purr, hiss, moo, squeal, honk, quack, bleat, trumpet, cluck, gobble, tweet, hoot, howl, buzz and hiss.
Activities
* Play 'Guess who I am?', in which children take turns to make and identify animal noises. Also encourage them to record their animal sounds and to play the guessing game using the recordings.
* Play 'Who is the lion?' One child faces away from the group while another roars like a lion. The listener then tries to identify the 'lion'. If they fail, the 'lion' makes another animal noise, and so the game continues until the person is identified.
* Play 'Roar your name'. Challenge the children to growl, hiss, squeak, quack, bark... their names.
* Play 'Simon Says', where Simon says quack like a duck, or bleat like a lamb.
* Go for a listening walk and record the animal and insect noises that you hear.
* Listen to birds singing outside in the trees, in the park, in an aviary and in recordings of bird song. Compare two different bird songs on the recording, such as a blackbird and a crow, and see if children can identify them.
Stories and poems
Share stories, rhymes and songs with animal sounds in them, such as:
Here is a beehive (clench fist)
Where are the bees? (look around)
Hiding inside (peep inside fist)
Where nobody sees!
Soon they come creeping out of the hive (open fist slowly)
One, two, three, four, five (open fingers one at a time)
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! (wave fingers)
(See also Resources, pages 18-19)
Hop to it
Explore the different ways in which animals move
Mimicking animal movements provides plenty of opportunity for physical activity, but it will also enhance children's understanding of animals and extend their vocabulary.
* Introduce children to the different ways animals move through first-hand observations and by watching videos.
* Discuss how the animals move and introduce the relevant vocabulary such as, creep, crawl, hop, fly, slither, scurry, scamper, bound, crouch, trot, waddle, gallop, canter and lumber.
* Make a set of cards with movement words on them. Ask the children to hang from each card pictures or drawings of animals that move in this way.
* When outdoors, ask children using climbing equipment about animals that climb, leap and swing from tree to tree. What animals have they seen that creep, crawl or scamper?
* Play a game where one group of children pretend to be animals and the other group guess the animals that they are pretending to be.
* Suggest the children play the movement version of 'Can you...?' For example, 'Can you do three elephant steps, two tiger leaps and one kangaroo jump?' Experiment with a wide variety of animal movements, from those of a gazelle and elephant to a snake and snail.
Lumbering elephants
* Using a drum to make a slow beat, walk with large, heavy footsteps like an elephant.
* Bend over and extend one arm to create a long, dangling trunk.
* Encourage the children to plod about to the sound of the drum until they hear the tambourine making a spraying water noise when the 'elephants' can lift their trunks and pretend to spray water everywhere.
Galloping horses
* Encourage the children to gallop like horses.
* Lay out cones so that they can gallop in out of the cones.
* Use ribbons so that pairs of children can hold each end of a ribbon and canter together.
* Introduce words such as trot, canter and gallop.
Hopping bunnies
* Encourage the children to hop like rabbits through the long grass.
* Ask them to look round to make sure nothing is chasing them, then to swing their arms to help them make really long jumps.
* Explore burrowing movements and provide blankets and throws that the children can use as burrows.
Rolling pigs
* Read The Pig in the Pond by Martin Waddell (Walker Books, 4.99).
* Talk about how pigs like to wallow in mud to cool their bodies as they do not sweat. The mud also protects them from insect bites and sunburn.
* Suggest that the children pretend to be large pigs rolling in sticky mud.
Running tigers
* Discuss which animals can run very fast and have a good sense of smell, sight and hearing.
* Talk about how tigers and cats hunt. Pretend to be tigers stalking their prey by crawling silently, close to the ground, then pouncing.
Scurrying chickens
* Talk about how chickens nod their heads and flap their wings as they go along, scratching in the soil for bugs and pecking at their food. What actions can the children mimic?
