We are off to a great start for our new school year and are quickly getting into a new groove with things. We just finished up two weeks of pet themed preschool activities and I am sharing them with you below. The activities we completed came from my Pet Preschool Unit. We had so much fun playing and learning about different kinds of pets the last two weeks. Here is the calendar of activities that we followed. Each day we focused on either dogs, cats, fish, or birds. This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. Please read our full disclosure here. Pet Themed Sensory Play Our pet themed sensory activities included a dog washing station, pet cage building, and cupcake playdough kit. For the Dog Washing Sensory bin, I just added some dogs to a bin full of mud and got them dirty and the kids played with them and then they had to give the dogs a bath. We used a dog dish from the Dollar Tree for fun. The kids used different blocks and items around the house make different pet animal cages for our different stuffed pet animals. My kids absolutely LOVE playdough kits and will spend hours daily playing with them. I swapped out our Dinosaur Playdough Kit for a cupcake making kit to go along with our cat themed read aloud, If You Give a Cat a Cupcake and they have logged at least 10 hours playing with it since I first gave it to them this week. Pet Themed Letter, Number, Shape, Color Activities Our focus skills for our pet unit were the letter Pp, Number 1, gray and pentagon. On day 1 I introduced the focus skills to Mr. 4 with our skill mats. We discussed each of them, he traced and completed each of the mats with a dry erase marker and then he went on a color gray hunt around the house. Mr. 4 practiced writing number 1, letter Pp, and drawing a pentagon in some gray kitty "litter". He thought it was hysterical and pretended the clumps were kitty poop. The "litter" is simply salt and black paint mixed together. Playdough is one of my must have homeschooling materials. We use it for so much. Mr. 4 used it to build the number 1, letter Pp, and a diamond and then he used feathers to retrace each skill again by sticking the feathers into the playdough. School is always more fun when you get to use food. Little Man used goldfish crackers to build his letter, number, and shape and then got to eat his lesson which was his favorite part. Pet Fine Motor & Gross Motor Activities This section of activities is included in the curriculum to ensure all letters, numbers, shapes, and colors are practiced through the entire year. If a theme needs to be skipped it is ok and they won't miss anything important because of these fine and gross motor activities that incorporate playful learning activities for all letters, all colors, all numbers, and all shapes. After reading, Harry the Dirty Dog, the kids used our Kwik Stix Paint sticks to give the doggie dirty spots. Since we don't have gray paint, we were able to discuss color mixing and practiced mixing black and white together to get gray. The kids then used their finger to give the kitty gray fingerprint spots. We love "feed the animal" activities and I love incorporating them into our lessons as much as I can. Mr. 4 practiced his fine motor skills by picking up a colored worm and feeding it to the birdie as he told me the color of the worm. We finished the week off with a big review activity of all shapes, colors, numbers, and letters. I drew some colored fish on a big piece of paper and then wrote letters, number, and shapes all over the page. Mr. 4 had to color each of the fish the correct color and then he would tell me a letter, shape, or color on the page and use dot markers to cover them and show fish bubbles on the page. Pet Number Sense & Counting Activities Little Man had fun with his number sense and counting activities this week. He fed a dog, added whiskers to a cat, counted feathers on a bird, and counted schools of fish. The kids raced to feed the dog. I had a bowl of food on one side of the room and they had to roll dice to pick up that many spoonfuls of food, race to the doggie, and feed him. Whoever fed the dog all over their scoops first won that round. It was so much fun and they requested to do it over and over again. For this one, I punched holes in the cats from our Pet unit and cut up pieces of pipe cleaner and Little Man has to count and add different amounts of whiskers to each cat. We used the Feather Counting mat from the activity pack to practice identifying numbers and counting different amounts of feathers. I prepared these school of fish cards from the activity for Mr. 4 to use and he would grab them and complete them when I was working with Miss 6 on her lessons. It was the perfect activity for him to practice counting and identifying numbers. Pet Art, Crafts, Science Activities The kids loved creating collars for all of their stuffed pets. They strung beads onto some string and added a tag made of card stock. This pet species activity went so well with our science lesson this week. We talked about classifying animals and plants and then Little Man sorted different pets by their kind. He was so funny and walked each of the animals into their bag. He had a blast with such a simple activity. I always save tissue paper from gifts and I was excited that I had this fun shimmering polka dot paper in my stash for the kids to use for their paper plate rainbow fish craft. I cut the tissue paper into squares and they glued them all over a paper plate and then cut out some fins that I drew on paper for them and glued them on. Pet Themed Math Activities Our math activities for our Pet unit included number order, making equal groups, patterns, and sorting and graphing. I cut out bone shapes from construction paper, wrote numbers on them, and Little Man practiced putting them in number order. Miss 6 loves "teaching" her brother and helped him with this activity. She would create a small group of dog figures and Mr. 4 would have to make an equal group of dogs in his pile. This was a great hands on activity to talk about same and equal. He practice AB patterns using feathers and the feather cards from our pet unit pack. And another activity that was a hit with both kids because they got to eat their lesson after...our goldfish sort and graph activity. These types of activities are great for discussing so many different concepts. They sorted by color, practiced graphing, and then we were able to discuss things like which one had more, which one had less, how many more/less etc. Pet Themed Literacy Activities For our pet themed literacy activities, we practiced beginning sounds, names, sight words, and alphabetical order. I gave Little Man a few letters and cards at a time and he had to sort them by beginning sound. The dogs got out and he had to get them back to their home before nightfall. Our name spelling activity this week was a fun kitty paw print name activity. He wrote his name on the paw and then I wrote the letters of his name on the toes and he put them in order. (Thanks to my sweet girl who helped me make an example to share with all of you.) This was another activity that Miss 6 helped Little Man with. He doesn't know any sight words yet, but exposure to them is still important and so he would pick up a worm, Miss 6 would tell him what it said, he would repeat it, and then feed it to his bird. Our final literacy activity for the unit was an ABC order bubble activity. Mr. 4 had drawn a fish on a piece of paper earlier in the day so we used it alongside fish bubble letters I made on construction paper. He worked to find and put all of the bubbles in ABC order. Pet Themed Preschool Journal Activities On our last day of the unit Mr. 4 completed some journal prompts in his journal. He traced lines I drew on the page to connect the ball to the pet, figured out some simple addition problems, used a feather to paint a letter Pp, number 1, and a pentagon on the page, and then colored fish different colors and then matched a dot marker bubble to each fish. Want the Plans & Printables? You can find all activities, plans, directions, and printables from our Pet Unit here. Or grab the entire Preschool Curriculum Bundle here. ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★