Animal Life Cycles (FREE Learning Material)

We are still continuing our vertebrate study and at this point we are exploring the life cycle of each group.  The aim of this study is to compare the life cycle of each group, to differentiate their development and identify their similarities as well.

Prior to this, I introduced the Animal Kingdom and the Vertebrate group.

To start off, we have The Life Cycle of a Frog for amphibians. Printable materials used here are my Animal Kingdom file, Vertebrate Sorting Cards and the Animal Life Cycles FREE printable.  The link to the file is at the end of this post.

I have the life cycle figures to represent the pictures. My son loooves them!

And I asked my son to name all the amphibians that he can remember.  I placed the pictures on the left and their life cycle on the right.

Here, we concluded that:

• Amphibians have jelly-like eggs.
• They lay their eggs in the water.
• They don't look like their parents when they are born.
• They have silky, slimy, and sometimes toxic skin.

Next are the birds. Same process here, he has to name any bird and then we'll talk about The Life Cycle of a Chicken.

As you can see, our Baby Bear is participating as well :)

After the discussion of the life cycle, we concluded that:

• Birds have hard egg shells.
• They lay their eggs on nest or in soft area and keeps them warm.
• They look like their parents when they are born.
• Their skin is covered with feathers.

Reptiles are my son's favourite group because dinosaurs belong here.  We talked about The Life Cycle of a Snake and see how it differs with the other groups.

Here we concluded that:

• They have hard leathery like egg shells.
• They lay their eggs on land.
• They look like their parents when they are born (hatchlings).
• They have scaly hard skin.

Then we have the fish and we talked about the Life Cycle of a Salmon to represent this group.

My file includes the order of the cycle and also a brief description of each stage.

Here we concluded that:

• Fish lay eggs in the water.
• Salmons have food sac when they're still young.
• They have gills and scaly skin.

And the last is the Life Cycle of a Dog for the mammals. My camera's battery ran out already so I wasn't able to take a picture.

Here we concluded that:

• Mammals are born as their parent's young. Meaning they look exactly the same as their parents. Not in an egg form but a little version of their Mommies and Daddies.
• Mothers feed their youngs with their milk.
• Mammals have furry or hairy skin that protects them.

At the end of our session, I gave him all the picture cards of the life cycles and asked him to arrange them in order.  Sorry the picture is not really clear as this was taken via my phone.  Here you can see that the child can easily differentiate how the animal groups differ from each other via their life cycle.

Materials used here are:

• Safari Ltd Life Cycle of a Frog
• Safari Ltd Safariology the Life Cycle of a Chicken
• Safari Ltd Reptiles TOOB

Animal Kingdom file, Vertebrate Sorting Cards and FREE Animal Life Cycles

Montessori Vertebrate Sorting Activity Cards

The FREE Animal Life Cycles which you can download for free by clicking the image below.

The Animal Kingdom

Sorry if this is such a long post! I just have to explain and show how we used the file :)  Thank you so much for your time and I hope you find it useful in your school and at home.

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