Animal Puzzles

Activity Overview

There are many benefits to doing puzzle work with young children, including fine-motor skill-building, problem-solving, understanding attributes, seeing separate parts as a whole, patterning, communicating with others, and patience. In this activity, children will have an opportunity to work with animal forms to tackle fine motor cutting practice, visual-spatial organization, and matching. Then we’ll end the activity with a fun and silly way to create fantastic animals!

What You Need

• Animal Puzzle Pieces - Please print and help your student cut along the lines so that each animal has three parts

• Optional: Animal Word Labels

Steps

1. Invite your student to observe the Animal Puzzle Pieces. Use the guiding questions to facilitate the conversation.

2. Guide your student to piece together the body parts until they form each of the whole animals.

3. Mix and match puzzle pieces to create a fantasy animal in the What is an Aardephant Elevark? activity!

Guiding Questions

• What do you notice about these pictures?

• What kind of line is this? Curvy? Zig zag?

• The [head] is part of the [tiger’s] whole body.

• What else does [the dolphin] need to have a complete body?

• Can you find the [mouse’s] [tail]?

Extensions

• Either keep the pieces separated to build animal puzzles again later, or glue or tape the completed puzzles onto construction paper.

• Match the Animal Word Labels to the completed puzzles. If your student is gluing or taping the puzzles to a piece of construction paper, guide them to glue or tape the word label next to the animal.