Animal Life Stages

Activities to try

1. 1

   Growing-up matching and ordering bench

   Why it works: Offspring grow into adults of the same kind; some young resemble their parent and some change form completely, but it is one creature changing as it grows, not two separate animals.

   1. Pair each baby animal to its grown-up: drag the kitten to the cat, the lamb to the sheep, the chick to the hen.
   2. Order a set of growth stages into the correct young-to-adult sequence; a misordered card returns to the start so the child tries again.
   3. Order the frog sequence: spawn, tadpole, tadpole-with-legs, frog, in order.
   4. Order the human sequence: baby, toddler, child, teenager, adult.
   5. Say aloud which looks-the-same animal (kitten→cat) and which looks-different animal (spawn→frog) you placed, and state that each is one animal growing up.
2. 2

   Anchor in the child's own human life stages

   Why it works: Children experience growth in their own lives; the human sequence is a felt, familiar anchor from which the same young-to-adult idea generalises to other animals.

   1. Order your own human life stages: baby, toddler, child, teenager, adult.
   2. Bring photos of yourself at different ages (where available) and place them along the baby→child part of the timeline; for the teenager and adult stages, use pictures of older people and say that these show later stages, not you.
   3. Describe what changes between stages (size, what you can do) while keeping it the same person growing up.
3. 3

   Reveal-the-stages growing-up strip

   Why it works: Each growth stage has a name and visible changes, and the young/adult pairs can be learned cleanly before ordering is practised independently.

   1. Tap each stage along a labelled life-stage strip to reveal its name.
   2. Lift a flap between stages to see what changed from one stage to the next.
   3. Do this for an animal whose young looks like the adult and one whose young looks different.