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Thinking about adding a pet to your classroom? Small Pets, Reptiles, Fish and Birds are a great way to enhance the learning experience. They can illustrate abstract concepts, teaching students about responsibility, compassion and friendship. They're also easy to care for and interact with.
Pets can play an important role in teaching children about compassion and responsibility. Children often see their pets as friends and confidants, so they serve as a strong source of emotional support.
Here are some ways for you to work pets into your own classroom!
Produced in partnership with Scholastic, this video takes students inside a PetSmart to learn about three unique pets. Get your pencils and paper ready—there's a quiz, too!
Download our coloring and fun facts sheets for a great learning activity around pets.
K-1st grade teacher
April Lattimore has two Turtles in her classroom and told PetSmart about her lesson plans using the pets as illustration:
We have done lessons on creating a schema chart (using our background knowledge to talk about what we already know, recording new learning, and then moving in prior knowledge to the misconceptions box if we learned it was not true).
We have talked about living and non-living and wants and basic needs too. We have learned about the parts of a turtle and why they are important.
We created brace maps to show the parts of a turtle. We also made tree maps to chart what turtles are, what they can do, and what they have.
Then students drew pictures and wrote sentences about turtles. I am teaching lessons in two classes … so I teach the same lesson for a couple of weeks in a row. I will continue to come up with other lessons. I do not mind sharing any lessons I have taught.