Pet Show! Lesson Plan
Students bring in stuffed animals of their own and take turns sorting them.
- Grades: PreK–K, 1–2
About this book
Students enjoy Ezra Jack Keats's illustrations in Pet Show! as well as stories featuring Peter of The Snowy Day fame. Children love sharing information about their stuffed animals.
Students will "collect, sort, organize, and draw conclusions about data using concrete objects, pictures, numbers, and graphs." --Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework
- Pet Show! by Ezra Jack Keats
- New shower curtain liner
- Colored masking tape
Set Up and Prepare
- Ask children to bring in one stuffed animal for a Pet Show activity. Be clear when asking children to bring in one stuffed animal, or students may bring in large amounts. You may also want to specify how large you'd like the animals to be.
- If head lice is a concern, don't let children share animals with each other.
- Spread out the curtain liner and use the tape to create a large grid. The liner will function as a large piece of graph paper. Be certain the squares are big enough to fit an object like a shoe or stuffed animal.
Spread out the shower curtain graph and gather students in a semi-circle. Have students take turns placing their animals on the graph, sorting by:
A) number of feet
C) omnivore, carnivore, herbivore
D) skin, scales, feathers
E) flying, walking, swimming
Use a large sheet of graph paper to record and label one of the student-generated graphs.
For older students, have them use graph paper to create graphs based on their "Pet Show" animals.