Category Archives: Classroom Pets
Vet’s Office via twinkl
Yesterday, I shared about twinkl with you! Who went and looked around? What awesome stuff did you find that you could use?
Today, I’m going to share how I used the resource pack from twinkl to transform my home living area into a Vet’s office. I laminated each item so it would last for the next month or so. 🙂
Every Vet’s office needs appointment cards!
I used these cards in the pocket chart that is in my vet’s office. The children can use them to help diagnose their patients. 🙂
These are the beautiful, real pictures that are included in the pack. I hung these around my vet’s office as they were appropriate. 
Love this sheet that the humans have to fill out about their pets. 🙂
I made two copies of this Pet Care word mat and placed them different places in the vet’s office. The children can use these as a guide to write sentences about their pets.
You can’t have a vet’s office without a way to keep track of your appointments!
This sign showing when the office is open will help my kiddos learn to tell time. 🙂
My kiddos love the OPEN and CLOSED signs. They like to be the one who flips the sign over to OPEN the store. 
Also included, are these great posters to include in your vet’s office area as advertisements for services that are offered there. 🙂 Love the variety!
And of course, worried human mommies and daddies will need a place to wait while their pet is being looked at!
Now a look at how this all looks in the vet’s office!
Inside the vet’s office. The patients are on the right, the vet’s exam table is in the middle and the stove holds important tools and bandages. 
Love these signs! 🙂
Pet wash area!! 🙂 
Vet’s bag of tools. 
This appointment sheet is laminated so that it can be used over and over again. 🙂
The kids voted and determined that we will have an exotic animal vet’s office, complete with polar bears, jaguars, horses, cows, beavers, and ducks! We looked through all the stuffed animals I had in the closet and these won out!
I’ll post more pictures of everything in action soon. 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Pictures of the Pigs
Here are some pictures of our newest classroom pets: Fluffy and Kiss:
Fluffy is on the left and Kiss on the right (Fluffy is the brown calico and Kiss is the gray and white pig)
Fluffy
Kiss
They are one month old guinea pigs. I feed them a piggy salad (romaine lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, spinach, parsley, strawberries, and other fruits and veggies) two times a day along with their hay. Now…how to figure out how I will get them to school…hmmmm!
Observation Sheet
This is an observation sheet I’ve been using with my students to look into what our meal worms, toads, and our new guinea pigs (Kiss and Fluffy) are doing.
The children can draw a picture on the left and write a few words about what they are seeing on the right. I’ve also encouraged my students to label their pictures if they do not want to write sentences.
If you have the ABC Print font on your computer, the lines will be ruled lines, if not, they will be regular black lines (there are 5 short lines).
This can be used for many different types of observations…not just animals! You could also use them and create science notebooks out of them. 🙂
Pictures of the guinea pigs to come soon!
Kristen 🙂
New Pets
We have several new critters in our classroom this year. They are all part of our Kindergarten Zoo! I’ve shown you the Meal Worms before, but we have also added Hermit Crabs and now Toads!! My sister found some toads when she was cleaning out the window wells at her church during their workday last Sunday. She called and asked if I wanted them and so now we have Toads. I think our Zoo is now complete as I can only remember to feed so many things at a time!! When we got the toads, we talked about how we should go about feeding them. We figured out two ways to do this. Some of the children volunteered to dig for worms in the dirt around the school (we need to get permission first before this can begin–I have a class set of child sized shovels to help us!) and the second way is to just feed them our meal worms and the meal worm beetles. Everyone seemed to be okay with this plan and so our happy little toads are enjoying their new habitat!
This is a picture of one of the happy little guys! We have four of them all together.
Meal Worms
Hermit Crabs
They were in a small tank, but didn’t seem so happy! Now they crawl all over the place and I’ve since added some things for them to climb on.
More Work Stations (2010)
Here are some more pictures of Literacy Work Stations in action.
This is the Magnet Work Station. I have one large magnetic dry erase board and two bags (from the Target Dollar Spot). In each of the bags, there are a box of magnetic letters, a set of everyone’s names (laminated), and some sorting sheets and alphabet matching sheets.
Here’s a look inside.
Here it is in use…
This is what’s currently in the Games and Puzzles Work Station. I showed this one last year and you can get the Find It tubes at Target now. I made this sheet in Word and laminated it (actually I made two of them because I have two tubes like this one) and the children circle the letters as they find them and then just wipe it all off when they are done.
This is the ABC/Word Work Station (see last post for a description).
Using pointers to read Big Books. In all my other Big Books (except the Alphabet ones), I put post it notes or laminated task cards with words for the children to find.
This our new Pocket Chart poem for the week. I found it in the Interactive Charts book that goes along with the Building Blocks framework.
Here are a few closeups:
They are numbered so that the children can match a word with a number two to the second sentence, and a word with a number three to the third sentence, and so on.
This is one part of the transparency that I made for Cookie’s Week.
This is the other half. I imported a picture from Amazon.com of the front of the book so that the children would know book this sheet goes with. I then thought up some things that the children might have done (those are on the transparency above) and then drew little pictures in (for those who cannot read the words yet) on the ends of the strips. The children use their pictures (that I printed on transparencies also using iPhoto’s Contact Sheet setting, grayscale). Then they use the strips (that I’ve number as well) and fill in the sentences.
Here is a look at two of my students using the Pocket Chart Station, sorting the names by “Boys and Girls”.
Here is the Library Work Station, just the seating area.
Here are Hermit Crabs (they reside next to the meal worms). Their names are Red and Flip Flop.
Here is an updated picture of our meal worms.
These are our plants. Spidey is hanging from the ceiling (he’s a spider plant). The other two are Fred and Flossie. They are Philodendrons (sp?). We’ve practiced being really nice to them and saying nice things to them so they will grow big and strong.
That’s all for now! I’ll be posting more about our Bulldog Buck Store in just a minute! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 