Education: Classroom Activity

Animal Magazine Activities

Animal magazines such as the San Diego Zoo's ZOONOOZ, National Wildlife, and Audubon arrive in millions of mailboxes each month. They are great for providing reference material for classroom projects and real-life examples of science. Once you've read the magazines, don't just throw them in the recycling bin! Here are some ideas for using the animal pictures in these publications in fun and educational ways.

Collect magazines from students and friends and use some of these free and easy ideas.

1. Animal Adaptations Create-a-Creature

Content Area: Science
Topics: Physical adaptations, habitats

Materials:

One piece of 9 inch x 12 inch white construction paper or newsprint per student.
Crayons or markers and pencils
This activity requires a lot of animal pictures from magazines (at least 30 magazines).

Procedure:

Using markers, crayons, or colored pencils, students draw a habitat on the paper.
Students piece together a new creature that is adapted perfectly for this habitat by cutting and pasting parts of animals from the magazines.
Encourage conservation of materials by setting up boxes labeled "heads," "bodies, " and "legs." Students should sort the parts of the pictures that they do not use into these boxes. They should also look in these boxes FIRST for a part they don't yet have.
On the back of the completed picture, students write the "natural history" of this creature including what it eats, where it resides in the habitat (in the trees, underground, in a nest), whether it is a mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish or invertebrate.
Students should describe how the body parts they have put together make up the physical adaptations of the animal. Encourage this with questions such as: "How do the feet help it survive?" or "What are the body parts that help the animal get food?"

2. Predator-Prey strip-paper weaving

Content areas: Science, Art
Topics: (Science) Animal relationships, (Art) Weaving

Materials:

Each student needs two different, full page animal pictures from a magazine. We'll call them picture A and picture B. One picture should be a predator, the other a prey animal.
Each student will need a strip of tape attached to his/her desk.
Strips of construction paper 9 inches long (2 per student) and 12 inches long (2 per student). These will be used to make a frame for the finished piece.

Procedure:

Place picture A the "tall" way. On the back of the picture draw a line across the paper, a half inch down from the top. Call this the "stop line." Across the bottom, measure and mark off every half inch. Draw lines from the hash marks up to the "stop line." These lines will be the guides for cutting the paper for weaving. Starting at the bottom, cut the paper at the half inch marks all the way up to the "stop line." DO NOT CUT PAST THE STOP LINE.
Now you are ready to cut picture B into strips. With the picture the "tall" way, flip it over, measure every half inch down the side and draw lines all the way across. Cut the picture into these half inch strips.
You will merge the two pictures by weaving the strips from picture B into picture A Use a simple over and under weaving pattern. The tape is used to secure the strips of picture B on the back of picture A.
Create a frame by taping together the strips of construction paper along the edges of the picture.

Note about the topic for this activity: This activity can also be used to illustrate other concepts depending on the theme of the unit. Some suggestions are: other animal relationships like host and parasite or symbiosis; animal opposites, like large and small; animal habitats, one animal lives in the ocean and the other lives in the desert; or life cycles using a baby and an adult of the same species. Learn more about master weavers in the bird world, the sociable weaver!

3. Make an "eye can"

Content Areas: Art, Student esteem

Topics: (Art) Collage; (Student esteem) positive mental attitudes

Materials: Each student brings in a clean, dry frozen orange juice can. Have a supply of animal magazines available.

Procedure: Cut out and paste to the can the eyes of animals from the magazines. Use the cans for pencil holders on each student's desk. When students are feeling challenged by a task and they say "I can't," remind them of the effort it took for them to create the "Eye Can." Every student has an "Eye Can" close by to remind them that "I Can."