Practice some early math skills with this Animal Sorting Activity for kids. Get your toddlers and preschoolers to sort and classify the different animals into their respective habitats. This is a great STEM activity that you can do both at home or in your early years classroom.
Do your kids love STEM activities? Grab your copy of the Free STEM eBook for Toddlers and Preschoolers. It’s filled with fun and easy STEM activities that will delight children in the early years.
Disclosure: Adult supervision is required for all activities at all times. Some of the links provided in this blog are affiliate links. I will be paid a commission if you use this link to make a purchase.
More Stem Activities for Kids
Learning STEM is so beneficial for kids. It teaches them essential life skills that will help them to be successful in school and in life. Here are some more STEM activities to try with toddlers and preschoolers.
- Building Animal Towers – STEM Challenge for Kids
- Craft Stick Shape Mats
- Dinosaur Number Match Activity
- Magic Milk
- DIY Balance Scales
For more ideas, take a look at these 34 STEM Experiments for Toddlers.
Materials Needed
- A variety of small toy animal figures
- 4 containers or sheets of paper (optional)
- 3 labels, saying “land”, “sea” and “sky” (optional)
How to make an Animal Sorting Activity
1. Gather all your animals and place them in a single container.
You can also just place all of your animals in a single pile. You don’t need to have any containers for this activity. It just makes the activity look more inviting for the kids to play with.
It is important to have a large variety of animals in your original pile. After all, you can’t sort animals into their groups if you don’t actually have any of each of the groups.
For example, if you don’t have any toy ocean animals, when the activity is over, there will be no animals in your “sea” group.
If you don’t have that many toy animals available, you can do this activity with pictures of different animals instead.
2. Set up your groups.
I used three sheets of colored paper and labeled them “land”, “sea” and “sky”.
If you prefer, you can use 3 different containers instead, or use nothing at all. Once again, it’s not actually essential to the activity to have sorting tubs or containers.
How to play
1. Pick any animal out of the original pile.
2. Identify the animal and talk about its defining features.
Defining features could include things like:
- How many legs it has.
- How it moves.
- What it eats.
- And of course, where it lives.
3. Place it in the container with the correct label on it.
For example, a fish would be in the “sea” container.
4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 for all of the animals you have.
There are a lot of different ways to play with toy figurines, you can use them to teach art, science and more. Take a look at these 10+ Ways to Play with Small World Figures.
What You’re Learning
STEM
Science – Talking about the different animals while you are sorting them is a great science lesson for little kids.
You can take this activity one step further and turn any defining feature into a sorting activity.
For example, you can:
- Sort by diet, (classify the animals as herbivores, carnivores and omnivores)
- Sort by habitat (pets, farm or wild animals)
- Sort by the number of legs they have (0, 2, 4, 6 or 8)
- Sort by body covering (scales, fur or feathers)
- Sort by size (large, medium or small)
Math – There are a few different early math skills involved in this simple activity.
Counting – Count the number of animals in each group, the whole group or how many legs each animal has. There are so many different things to count with this group of toys.
Sorting and classifying – this is an important math concept that will be applied to numbers as your children enter school. But you can still teach sorting and classifying to toddlers and preschoolers with items other than numbers.
Informal measuring – this refers to measuring an item using something other than a standard unit of measurement. For example, a toy elephant is the same length as 4 toy cats. In this example the toy cat is the unit of measure.
Are you going to try this Animal Sorting Activity with your kids?
Don’t forget to pin the idea for later.
