Camouflage Animals

This was a great end of the year lesson with my kindergarteners. I got the lesson from a recent School Arts magazine. The focus of the lesson was on camouflage, what it is and how animals use it to protect or hide themselves. We spent a day discussing this while each table had some pictures to look at and later describe to the class. After wards they each got to choose whether they wanted a tiger or a leopard and they received a quarter sheet of animal print paper. After gluing this down to a sheet of construction paper, they finished the camouflage pattern with appropriate colored crayons.




I made tracers of 'big cat' body shapes which the children used the following class period to trace and cut out their cats. The next period they glued down their cats and began adding the 'habitat', which they made by ripping paper into grass and tree shapes.




The last class was spent putting on finishing touches such as more grass, eyes and teeth or extra stripes or spots on their animals.

I liked this lesson a lot because the students were able to see the great results possible by breaking a project down into smaller pieces. They learned about camouflage, the behaviours of 2 different animals as well as carefully observing the actual patterns on these two animals.
This lesson would also be appropriate for 1st grade.