Zoology
Curriculum Review for the Sassafrass Zoology Unit from Elemental Science
We loved this life science unit! At first, I was hesitant to study animals for an extensive amount of time, but my 8 year old twin girls and 4 year old pre-schooler soaked it up and I am surprised by how much fun we had.
Prepping the Unit:
We purchased the combo e-book version of the parent guide and the SCIDAT logbook. I printed and bound three logbooks and the parent guide at home. The kids drew their own logbook covers and then we also purchased the digital audio book versus buying the book. In the beginning, we listened to the audio book while the kid’s worked on drawing animals in their logbooks, but by the end of the unit, the kids lost interest in the book and just wanted to read and write about the animals.
To record animal facts in the logbooks each week - you can pull facts out from the audio book, but I encouraged my kids to research facts that interested them and by the end of the unit they could do this independently which was a fun skill to see develop. We found the Encyclopedia of Animals was our first go-to book, but we also used the parent guide, Atlas Animals, The Natural World, and all of the “Big Book” collection. We’re also utilized our library to pull in a bunch of picture books and fun stories with animals as the main character.
I’d highly recommend using the Draw, Write, Now books with this unit. Each animal we studied, the kids sketched a drawing in their logbooks. It is cheapest to buy the DNW set, but if you’re looking to purchase individually then you’ll want books 4, 6, 7, and 8. I purchased them all seperartly over time, but I wish I had just gotten them in a box set to begin with because we use them so much. For pre-school and Kindergarten age, they can copy the animals facts right out of these books. For older kids, these are an excellent resource to incorporate art into this unit and learning how to draw. For animals that we couldn’t find in these books we used Art Kids Hub or another simple on-line tutorial.
We did a lot of craft and art projects with this unit because it was what my twins were most interested in doing, but you certainly don’t have to. If you need recommendations for art supplies to keep on hand, this is my Amazon supply list. I have a “supply closet” with some of these items up high. This way it stays organized and I just bring down little projects or small amounts of materials at a time.
Supplement Materials:
Like so many units out there, you don’t need to supplement with anything, but I personally felt this unit would be a little dry and tedious without adding in some arts, crafts, experiments, sensory bins, and hands-on projects. I also tied in some gospel topics and linked what we used. Below, I organized what we supplemented with by animal to give you a little inspiration and also link the projects we did in case you want to do the same ones.
THE GRASSLANDS
LION
Gospel Topic: A great way to introduce this unit is with this video from Latter Day Kids. It is about how we are all children of God. The video has lions and other animals we’ll meet in this unit. We also read about the prophet Daniel and the lion’s den. We used Illustrated Bible Stories. We also also read about the symbolism of Christ as a lion in this book. We talked about The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe again (which we’ve previously studied) and the symbolism of the lamb and the lion. The Big Book of Beasts is a good one for this study.
Craft: Construction Paper Lion Heads from Inspired Class. The PDF link for the lion is broken on this site so I’ll link it here.
CHEETAH
Gospel Topic: Be Watchful Unto Prayer Continually by David A. Bednar. I would highly recommend this video. So so perfect for the Cheetahs. He refers to Spiritual Crocidles which we also have watched. These two videos are better for ages 7+.
Experiment: We used the cheetah eye one recommended in the guide book and it didn’t work very well.
GIRAFFE
Gospel Topic: Honesty and Integrity in The Giraffe Lesson (page 4) and Pass It On Fable about spreading our attitudes
Craft: Fingerprint Giraffes by Our Kid Things
Experiment: We made giraffe saliva recommended in the guide book and it was a really fun experiment.
ELEPHANT
Gospel Topic: Hard Work (Galations) Bastion The Baby Elephant by Latter Day Kids
Craft: Gerald from Make and Takes and the E Letter of the Week is from Crafty Bee Creations. For Gerald, we bought these 8 inch lanterns and I’d recommend hot gluing the template.
We also got The Complete Collection of Elephant and Piggie books for Christmas and read and re-read them all the time so this is a fun time to bring in those if you have young children.
ZEBRA
Craft: The Z from Letter of the Week from Crafty Bee Creations
The zebra is not in the logbook, but the kids really wanted to learn about them so on the back of one of the logbook pages we took notes on zebras. All my kids love making the letter of the week crafts and one thing I really like about this packet is there is an example for the kids to copy. So, I can just quickly print the templates off for my kids. I usually prep them the night before and have them sitting out on the table for a simple morning work activity before our day begins. As a heads up, we use this paper for all our letter of the week’s which I really prefer especially over construction paper.
THE DESERT
CAMEL
Gospel Topic: Since it’s nearing Christmas we read The Camel Had Wandered (Christmas story) and we talked about the use of the camel in the Bible, and read another quick story with lots of camel facts called The Incredible Camel that include some scriptures.
Craft/Experiment: We couldn’t find any we loved for this so we skipped it.
COBRA
Gospel Topic: This went so well because while we were reading about cobras one of my girl’s asked why God would allow poisonous animals on the Earth. It was the perfect segway into the Garden of Eden and the serpent and why we have adversary. (This is a pretty good video on the fall if you want to go this direction.) We also talked about the snake infestation of the Jaredite lands and watched this video. It’s a great video on why animals behave the way they do during drought seasons.
Experiment: We did the reptile egg experiment recommended in the guidebook and the kid’s loved it!
SPINY-TAILED LIZARD
Gospel Topic: This was an interesting article I came across, but I didn’t really know what to focus on with the kids so I didn’t bring anything up. There is a mention of lizards in Leviticus as unclean animals, but I didn’t say anything about it ….we just had fun making our 3D lizards.
Craft: 3D Lizards We used 9x12 construction paper because it’s what I had on had on hand and they turned out okay, but I wish we would’ve had 12x18 like the video suggested.
FENNEC FOX
Gospel Topic: The Valiant Fox by Latter Day Kids
Craft: Paper Plate Fox - The twins are really into foxes right now (they were even foxes for halloween!) so this was probably their favorite craft we’ve done.
AMAZON RAINFOREST, MOUNTAIN AND BAMBOO FORESTS
We started this unit in October and skipped the forest sections so we could do the Arctic study in January. This worked really well. We came back to the Amazon, Mountain and Bamboo forests in March and spent most of our time on the Amazon. We read a lot of books on it and watched some Disney Nature shows. By the time we got to these animals, the girls were doing their work independently each day so I didn’t spend a lot of time in these areas with them. Each day they would study an animal, draw it, and write some facts about the habitat and the animal. Since we dived deeper into the Amazon and we’d already done a mini forest animals theme last Fall we didn’t do anything extra for the koala, rabbit, owl, deer, panda, eagle, monkey or mouse. Except one day it worked out well because we happened to go to Cabelas and they had a fun mountain forest set up. The day we went the kids were able to catch a live fish and we were able to see the taxidermy animals - including lots of deer. The girls absolutely loved just reading about and drawing the animals, but I’ll also share what else we did and some past activities for some inspiration.
For our study of the Amazon we did the Kiwi Co. Rainforest box. The kids made butterflies and a rainforest stick which was fun. This link will get you $10 off your first purchase if you haven’t used Kiwi Co before. We also visited an aquarium in January that had a rainforest room. There is also a butterfly biosphere museum in our area that we’ve visited multiple times.
SLOTH
Gospel Theme: Topical Guide: Slothful - We looked up scriptures and talked what it means to be slothful in our work. (Proverbs 18:9)
Craft: Animal Sewing Kit - we started the sloth in here but never finished it. It was a little too advanced for the girls so we will re-visit this, but I think it would be so fun for older kids and especially since there are a lot of animals in here.
TOUCAN, FROG, AND BUTTERFLY
For the Toucan we did this classic paper plate craft and also painted some butterflies at the same time. It’s fun to paint half of a sheet of paper and press it to the other half and talk about symmetry. We did live caterpillars a few years ago, but I was so tempted to do them again because they are so fascinating and fun to watch. Those are one of my favorite things to do in the Spring! These are the caterpillars we ordered. Last year, we got a tadpole from Amazon too - with high hopes he’d turn into a frog. Unfortunately, a year later and he is still a tadpole, ha! Apparently, they can have a genetic factor where they won’t turn which was kind of a bummer. We did a whole mini frog unit so we didn’t spend a lot of time doing any of the extras here. If this is your first time ordering insect kits off Amazon - just be aware you have to order the kit and then send in for the insect/reptile once the kit comes so it takes a little longer than just your typical few days of shipping. I included a few pictures of our past units for inspiration. The butterfly is often used to represent Christ and His atonement which is such a beautiful way to help a child understand it better. Here is a good article on that from The Friend. And, this is an excellent video from Latter Day Kids on conversion and the butterfly.
FARM ANIMALS
For the cow, bee, chicken and spider, we studied these over the month of December and were doing a lot of Christmas crafts so I didn’t want to do anything extra. The twins really wanted to keep going in their animal studies so they did all these pages independently. They drew a picture, read about the animals and recorded a few facts. We’ve done lots of farm animal units so I felt like it was a good one to cruise through. We also have bees and hens so we’ve done a lot of hands-on learning with those. For chickens, we did a unit on the chicken life-cycle and used watercolored chicks using The Good and The Beautiful craft book. We also love the Julia Rothman books and tied in the Little Red Hen and talked about chores and helping in the family. We also made bread which was perfect. If you happen to be local to Utah, we also have visited Thanksgiving Point Ashton Gardens and there is a statue of Christ gathering chicks which we have frequently seen and talk about. This is a good video on hens and so is this one. (The cow, or ox, is religiously symbolic so that would be a fun one to spend a little extra time on.)
For bees, The Angry Bee from Latter Day Kids is great video that is wonderful for this topic. (If you have the Millennial Instructors “O Bee Wise” is also something we’ve pulled a lot from for our bee units. These aren’t in print anymore so it’s mostly just for those who already have them.) We did a diver deep into bees a few years ago and our family has a beehive. The girls harvest honey in the fall and in the summer they help with beekeeping on a weekly basis. I am adding a few older pictures for inspiration.
Right as we finished up our logbook, we were able to get some new baby chicks which is so fun if you’re in the position to do that.
ARCTIC
We did a deeper dive into the Arctic animals and the tundra because we wanted to study this habitat during the entire month of January. As I mentioned above, we ended up finishing up the forest units and the rest of the animals in March. There aren’t any religious resources we used for these, but this was a big study for us and here are some of the materials we used:
Arts and Crafts: One of my twins is really into arctic foxes and they both love penguins so we spent a little more time on both of these animals. One of them chose to make these popsicle arctic foxes and then we also did these adorable paper penguins as an art project. And, like usual, we integrated some drawing skills into their Scidat logbooks with the Draw, Write, Now books. This one is all on polar regions so it has been perfect!
Math: The twins are doing lots of multiplication practice to master their facts so I found this free multiplication game we used throughout the month. We also got this puzzle for my girls and this one for my boys which we also had out when we did the farm animals in the logbook.
Science: I wanted to do a little more than our animal studies so we’re also learning about snow and the snowflake life cycle (I got a little mini unit off Etsy for my five year old). We have used The Story of Snow book in the past for snow studies and love it. We did the classic blubber experiment (we used instructions from the Sassafrass unit).
Language Arts & Books: The Big Book of Blue has a great page on penguins and, of course we used the Encyclopedia of Animals as our main go-to for research. We have lots of polar picture books from the library, but I decided to buy The Arctic Fox Journey and Arctic Animals because these are two of my favorite series to have in our home for elementary and preschool. And, just for fun, we bought the girl’s these activity books all on foxes for Christmas. And, this one for my preschooler. As we wrapped up the unit, the kids wrote pretend stories about arctic animals as their main characters. We also read from Sing A Song and there are some really fun poems for the month of January on all these themes.
Sensory Bin: Instasnow, snowy playfoam, and arctic animals. The books I have pictured with our sensory bin come from The Mindful Heart: Alphabet Avenue and Alphabet Rhyme books.
Videos and Music: Elegy for the Arctic is a great classical piece and we also watched some documentaries on Disney Nature about penguins.
We finished up our study with a trip to the aquarium to see the penguins!
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall we loved this unit and I would definitely recommend it. Originally, when I interviewed my twins for the 2021-2022 school year they both said the number one thing they wanted to learn about was animals and I had planned to casually work it in, but we ended up switching to this curriculum mid-year so they could do a deeper study and I am really glad we did because THEY loved it so much. I’d say the logbook and the parent guidebook are an absolute must and the read-aloud is optional. My only complaint about the study is there are just a lot of animals and it can be pretty redundant especially as an adult, but since this was what the girls wanted I am glad we did it. I just feel like kids retain so much more when they have a high interest in a subject. A huge bonus of this curriculum was that my pre-schooler was able to do a lot of the logbook entries with us and he enjoyed doing the hands-on things we supplemented with. I take a soft approach with young kids so I would never require him to do anything, but if he was interested he’d join us also he’s got a lot of cute animal drawings and crafts too.
It took us about 4 months to work through the curriculum - In October and November we worked on it a couple of times a week (while also studying our core classes and history). We didn’t work on it much in February because we focused on holiday curriculum and history in February. And then in March we worked on it almost every school day to wrap up the unit (and didn’t work on history). I really prefer to study one main subject at a time (either history or science) versus both. I think the twins could’ve done this unit every day though. When we ended it in March, they were both disappointed that the study was over. I told them to just grab their sketchbooks and keep making their own logs on blank pieces of paper and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do.
Finally, for the cherry on top, we visited the zoo! Let me know if you decide to do this unit or if you have any questions! I am happy to help!