Wild About Animals

The Cincinnati Museum Center stopped by this week to present one of their programs, "Wild About Animals," to the preschool and pre-k classes. Ms. Deann led the group on a virtual safari, beginning in Africa. She talked about elephants, lions, giraffes, and zebras. The kids already knew some facts about elephants, like how they use dirt to protect their skin from sun. They learned the different uses for trunks.

Ms. Deann told them that male lions have manes to protect their necks from bites and also to help attract girlfriends. The kids thought that was hilarious! They also thought it was funny that giraffes have purple tongues to protect their tongues from getting sunburned when they are picking leaves from tall trees.

Ms. Deann handed out zebra finger puppets to everyone and they acted out what zebras do when they see a lion coming too close...the lookout lions call out "Woop woop!" to alert their friends and the zebras run away.

Everyone touched a pelt of real zebra skin. The fur was very smooth and soft.

We looked through the viewfinders to see other animals from Africa.

The next stop on the safari was Antarctica! Ms. Deann discussed emperor penguins with the group. She passed out baby penguins to everyone.

The kids tried to waddle around while keeping the baby penguins warm on their feet. It wasn't very easy!

Everyone huddled closely together just like penguins do to try to keep each other warm.

The final safari destination was a much warmer place...Australia! Ms. Deann taught the kids about koala bears and kangaroos. She let everyone smell eucalyptus since that is what koalas eat. The kids gave a thumbs up or thumbs down to let her know if they liked the smell. About half of the kids thought it smelled good. Ms. Allison thought it smelled yucky and gave it a thumbs down.

The last animal that we learned about was the kangaroo. Everyone loved the kangaroo toys with the joeys in the pouches. The kids learned that some kangaroos can jump 30 feet in one jump! They tried to jump that far but discovered that it took us a lot more jumps to go 30 feet :)