Activity: True or False

Help your child build important communication skills by inviting him/her to listen and responding to true and false animal facts.

Materials:
Animals pictures (species listed below) for your child to look at during the activity

Directions:
Have fun helping your child share ideas about which animal facts are true or false. For example, take a look at this statement and expected response: An elephant a golden mane. Answer: False; an elephant does not have a golden mane. A lion has a golden mane. This activity is a great way to build language skills in a fun way using animals.

• A zebra has brown spots.
• A dolphin is a sea animal.
• A monkey moves by slithering on the ground.
• Birds have feathers.
• A giraffe has black and white stripes.
• Snakes bark.
• Cats have whiskers.
• Bears do not have claws.
• Fish have gills.
• Tigers fly.

Talk about It: Ask your child to express ideas about why it is important to be truthful and how not being honest and truthful might hurt feelings or cause problems. Then encourage your child to continue the fun language activity and make up more animal (or people) facts that are true or false.

Take it Further: Choose a favorite story to read to your child. After reading the story, ask you child to share whether the characters were real or make-believe. Then have fun inviting your child to add endings to these short silly nonsense tales:

• My pet monkey eats at the dinner table with my family every night. He is my favorite dinner guest because...
• As soon as I find my space suit, I'm going to take off to...
• If the moon's really made out of cheese, I hope there's enough to make...
• If I were a fish in the ocean, I would always remember to...

With a Group: Have a fun "animalistic" time with your group by first looking at animal pictures, reading animals books, and modeling familiar animal sounds. Use animal sounds or musical recordings (like rainforest music) to help children match animal names and sounds. Invite children think about which group an animal sound would belong to; jungle or wild animals; farm animals; pet animals; or sea animals. Serve animal cookies, fruit juice, and plan a fun animal costume party or have animal picture coloring contest using Clifford printables available on this Web site.