Who doesn’t love a trip to the zoo? Zoos help show people the wonder of wildlife, and they play important roles in conservation. National Zoo Awareness Day is recognized on August 31 each year. It’s a great time to discuss the role zoos play in our communities and society, as well as the scientific benefits they provide. It’s also a great time to work some zoo-themed activities into your math class!
Zoo Animal Bar Graphs
You can reinforce students’ graphing skills by compiling a bar graph of favorite animals. It’s a fun, engaging, and practical example of polling and graphing in action!
Using a premade template like this one or a spare sheet of graph paper, poll your students about their favorite zoo animal. (Note: You may want to limit the variety of answers by pre-selecting several of the most popular animals to choose from.)
Label your graph with animal species on the x-axis and number of students on the y-axis with an appropriate scale. Don’t forget the title! Once that’s done, you can plot your data. For an extra bit of fun, you can color-code the bars. Ask kids to flex their artistic muscles by theming the bars after the related animals, such as brown splotches on yellow for a giraffe, orange and black stripes for a tiger, adding small tusks to a gray bar for elephants, and so on.
Animal Math Facts
Math-fact fluency is important before a child can develop more advanced skills. Practice makes perfect for math facts, and any addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division worksheet can easily be spiced up for Zoo Awareness Day by simply converting the questions into word problems featuring animals. Have a drill worksheet with a question like “3 x 4”? Turn it into this: “If 3 zoos have 4 bears each, how many bears do they have in all?”
It can also be fun to challenge students to come up with the questions themselves. In a classroom setting, pass out four note cards per student and ask them to write one word problem for each operation. Collect the questions, then go around the room asking students to solve them. Your kids will take pride hearing their classmates answer the questions they themselves came up with.
Looking for something ready-made? A printable addition and subtraction version as well as a multiplication and division version are available on our sister site, Super Teacher Worksheets.
Feeding Fractions
Have your students been working on fractions? Just like with animal math facts, any set of fraction problems can easily be turned animal-themed. Simply reimagine the questions as word problems about feeding time at the zoo! If three frogs each eat one eighth of a container of crickets, how much of the container will they eat in all? If each lion eats 5 and a half kilograms of meat per day, how many kilograms do 3 lions eat per day?
Click here for a print-and-go worksheet with themed fraction addition and subtraction problems.
Enclosure Area and Perimeter
Planning zoos can be a fun, hands-on way to practice area and perimeter. All you need is a pencil and graph paper (printable here).
Treat the edges of the graph paper like the borders of a zoo, then have students plan the layout of different animal enclosures. Students should label their enclosures as they go. Once they’re happy with the final product, they can go back and color-code everything.
Ask students to specify the perimeter and area of each enclosure on a separate sheet. Stick to “units” for your measurement, since working with scales like “50 feet per unit” can quickly become complicated.
Consider challenging older students to fit within certain constraints, such as “no less than 30 square units for the elephants” or “lions and tigers must be placed near each other.”
Once everyone is done, they can show off their zoo plans and their geometry skills at the same time!
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You can explore even more animal-themed math and ELA activities to celebrate National Zoo Awareness Day here.
