Animal Art Activities for Letters B, C, & D

A while back I wrote about how JT was doing Alphabet Animals and I wrote his activities for the Letter A. Finally I am moving on and writing about letters B & C.

For the letter B we actually learned about 3 different animals. The American Bison, the African Buffalo, and the bat. I may or may not have wrote that we talked a lot about the similarities between the aardvark and armadillo but we also did this with the bison and buffalo as well as our letter D animals (deer and dik dik).

JT’s art activity for the Bison was something I saw on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website. I drew an outline of the bison on a piece of paper and then we put glue on it and JT sprinkled coffee on it. Once he was done filling in the entire bison we went outside to pick some grass and he glued that down for the bison to eat.

For buffalo we watched the Tinga Tinga Tales episode Why Buffalo has Horns. In the story buffalo starts off with lots of long hair which he ends up using to sweep back the swamp to save the horned animals. After he saves them they invite him to live with them but he says he doesn’t have horns so squirrel braids his hair and points the braids up towards the sun. Once the sun has dried his hair it turns into horns and from then on buffalos had horns. So, to go along with the tale I decided we would braid some horns for buffalo. I printed out pictures of a buffalo and then we used chenille stems to braid the horns. For some reason I guess I didn’t really take pictures of this, I only have one.

To go along with bat we made a bat from a toilet paper roll. The first day JT painted the roll and painted wings and ears. The next day he cut out the wings and ears, glued them on the roll, and then because the Mexican Free-tailed Bat is the official Texas state flying mammal we cut out a tail.

Moving on, for letter C we learned about cheetahs and about how to tell the difference between cheetahs, leopards, and jaguars by their spots. I found this really interesting because I would always get confused about which was which. I divided a paper into three sections and wrote the name of each cat on each section and then JT used his fingerprints to make the spots. Cheetah spots are just that, spots. Leopard spots form a rosette and jaguar spots also form a rosette but with a dot in the middle.

Our second letter C animal was the crab. I originally planned on making just a paper plate crab (which we still did) but then I saw somewhere a crab made out of a letter C so we ended up cutting the plate in a C to make the crab.

Last we have the letter D. We did deer first and made a handprint and footprint deer head. I traced his foot which we used for the head and his hands were the deer’s antlers. After coloring it I cut it out for him and we glued it on a piece of paper and on the bottom of the paper I took the same concept except only using his fingers for the dik dik. If you aren’t familiar with the dik dik you can take a look at one here on the Afican Wildlife Foundation website. They kind of look like little deer but they’re antelope and they are really small. So I traced JT’s full thumb for the head and then traced just top part of his pinky to make the two horns and then I drew ears and he drew the face. He ended up drawing lines all over it though so you can’t see it that well but it’s there.

Well, that’s it for now, feel free to leave comments if you have any animal art projects to share.