Pet Themed Activities and Printables are a great way to incorporate pet-themed activities and printables to review skills when we are learning about pets. This is a cute theme that we can use to make learning come alive in your classroom.
Pet Themed Activities and Printables
After teaching kinders for countless years, and doing these skills over and over again, I discovered a few things. One fact I know is that when I teach subtraction, I should STILL have my students practicing addition and subtraction. This helps my students to not “lose” the idea of addition. Plus they work constantly on both skills.
They are able to connect the two concepts. Do they confuse which concept they are supposed to be doing? Yep. But I am getting them to pay attention to the math symbols NOW and continue to focus on it. Let’s face it. Whenever you mix addition and subtraction, they confuse the two then as well.
Building Words in Dog Bowls at the Yellow Table
What a fun dog-themed activity to help build words. Students take the dog bowl and look at the word in the middle. Then they use the dog bone letters to build the word. The best part is, the bone pieces and frame for the word are color coded to help the learner.
Addition Dog Houses at Orange Table
Our theme this week was all about pets so we had to find these cute doggies in their addition sum homes. To play, students lay out the dog houses. Then, students add the number on the dog. Finally, students match the dog to the right dog house, meaning the dog house with the answer on it that matches the addition problem.
Subtraction Dog Bone at the Red Table
This was a fun activity for my little learners. They literally RAN to this one. The goal of this station was to get my students to MATCH bone pieces to make a subtraction sentence.
To create this, I took bone accent pieces using a bone-themed template. I highly suggest you check out The Dollar Tree for notepads or accept pieces. Next, use a marker to write the subtraction sentence on ONE side. I included a number of pictures as well since we are new to subtraction. Then, the other side has the solution.
As I love to do, I made 4 sets of these with different colored bones for each student. My students liked this station because they didn’t have to write anything. And I liked this station because I like to show my students’ multiple ways to solve math problems.
Digraph Fish Bowls at the Red Table
This is a fun, differentiated sorting activity to put the fish in the correct fish bowl, but with digraphs of course. One version of this sorting board is shown above and uses digraph pictures. Another version, that is not shown, has the digraph words. What a fun Pet Themed Activities and Printables.
Bigger Addition Problems at Blue Table
This table was hard. It was a larger addition problem to practice, using pet-themed notepads. Why was this station hard? This table did not have counters and the numbers went higher than their ten fingers. This is my secret trick to get students to put the BIG number in their heads and add on.
You can see how this student put eight in their head, then added 7 dots to the bottom. They started counting at 8 and then counted using the 7 dots.
These cats were at the same table, but just for another student. This student needed to circle the bigger number, then add dots for the smaller number to find the solution.
And check out the fish. This student did the same addition strategy. But he started understanding that sense 11 is made with one set of ten and a one, then 10+1 is 11. He didn’t need to use counters.
You can grab this Pet Themed Activities and Printables here.
Kindergarten is such a fun year for writing and reading progress. I wish I would have saved more samples from my years of teaching over the years as each kid has such a unique style!
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