Yesterday we visited Howletts Wild Animal Park, near Canterbury. We’ve been there a few times before (you can read about one of our previous visits HERE), and as usual we really enjoyed making our way around the park and stopping to look at some of the animals – as well as some plants – along the way.
We started off with a visit to the rhinos, followed by wild dogs, lions, ant eaters, monkeys and other primates of various kinds, lemurs, river hogs, elephants, a peacock, deer, wolves, honey badgers, gorillas, bison, a tapir, and more.
It’s my intention to write a more extensive post about Howletts at some point, but for this post, my main focus is on a follow-up activity that we’ve done today: A lotto type game using photos of some of the animals and plants we looked at yesterday!
Penguin and I made this game together. I started off by selecting 8 of the photos we took yesterday and editing them into squares, which I then arranged on a page in Word (2 rows of 4 pictures on each, evenly spaced to make them easy to cut out).
I printed out two copies, to make two sets of the same 8 pictures. I then sat down with Penguin at the table so that we could make the game as a joint effort. He cut the pictures out, while I cut some card into slightly larger squares than our photos.
Penguin then glued each photo onto a card square, while I got two sheets of thick A4 paper and drew 8 squares on each of them, and then wrote the names of the 8 things in our photos in those squares. And that was our game done and ready to play!
When playing, we put all the picture cards on the table with their backsides up, and then took turn picking a card and placing it on corresponding square on our ‘game boards’ (the A4 papers).
We also used this as an opportunity to practice using Penguin’s AAC app, by finding and naming each pictured object. I think it all worked out pretty well, and we got to practice some fine motor skills as well as communication and memory recollection, names of the plants and animals etc. And Penguin won, as he almost always does!
Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know in the comments x
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Linking up with:
Sensational Learning with Penguin 
I love your game, a great way to follow up a lovely looking day. We have something very similar on our Education pages as a follow up to visits here at Coombe Mill, it’s a lovely way to reinforce learning. #CountryKids
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Hi Fiona, sorry for this ridiculously late reply, I seem to have somehow missed a few comments on this post, until now! Brilliant to hear that you have educational follow-up activities for your visitors, that’s lovely! x
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Looks like a dog great place to visit, I love a wildlife park#kcacols@_karendennis
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Thank you Karen! x
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This looks like a great activity and a really good way to follow up a trip out and keep memories alive. Would be good to do after a holiday as well. #KCACOLS
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Hi Clare, so sorry for this VERY late reply, but I seem to have missed a few comments on this post, as I’ve just discovered! Thank you for your encouraging words, and yes, it would be fab after a holiday too! xx
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Popping back from #KCACOLS
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Looks great, And the follow up game really brings home the message, and the magic of the place. #KCACOLS
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Thank you Enda! Yes, both the day out and the follow up turned out well this time 🙂 x
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We love visiting animal parks and what a great idea for a game to get children thinking about everything they’ve seen throughout the visit. #KCACOLS
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Thank you! Pictures are often a great support for our memories, aren’t they? And as Penguin can’t actually talk to us about things, they fill an extra important role for us 🙂 xx
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Looks a lovely place to explore interact elements to help with learning X #kcacols
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Thank you Sam! xx
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I would love to visit this park. Fabulous photos.
#Kcacols
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Thanks so much Veronica! I bet you have some fab animal parks where you live, too? xx
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Very clever. I would have never thought to do this #KCACOLS
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Thank you Jeremy! xx
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Howletts is an amazing day out isn’t it? I love that you used your day out to make such an amazing game together. I really enjoyed seeing your photos of you making the game, that must have been so much fun x
#KCACOLS
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I’m so sorry I seem to have missed replying to your comment, Lisa! I very much appreciated your lovely words! xx
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What a great little game / activity for the little ones. I am pretty useless at this mum crafting type stuff, but I can see my daughter is craving to learn so I’m going to start trying some things like this. Thanks for sharing #KCACOLS
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Thank you Shelley! This is so simple to do, no special talents required 😉 I’m so happy to hear you feel inspired to try it! xx
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This looks like such a great place to visit. Thank you for sharing #KCACOLS
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Thank you! It’s great, as is their sister park at Port Lympne, too 🙂 x
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Howletts Animal Park looks like a lovely place for a day out. I love how you turned the photos of the animals into a game. What a good way to help learn the different types of animals. Might have to try doing something like this with Sophie – she would love it. Thanks for sharing with #CountryKids
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Thank you Louise! It works as good reading practice as well 😉 And I popped a couple of plant names in too, along with the animals. Of course, the possibilities of variations on this is almost endless xx
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Great to have a follow up game too. #KCACOLS
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What a great day out – and so good to embed some learning afterwards. Thanks for linking it up ton #spectrumsunday
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Thank you Ann! It worked out really well, and we’re still enjoying that game 🙂 x
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The gorilla…how sad.
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It does look quite sad there, doesn’t it? Though I think it was more tired… They’ve got a huge amount of space and things to climb on, hide away in etc (but obvs that can’t be seen in this photo). The Aspinall Foundation who run this park and the one at Port Lympne do a lot of conservation work and some of their animals get released back into the wild. So I like to think that they are well cared for in their parks too. At least I hope so! Generally, their parks give the animals a very generous amount of space.
Here’s a bit more about their work, with gorillas in particular: https://www.aspinallfoundation.org/the-aspinall-foundation/?_ga=2.89074328.280833719.1572528943-1975588517.1572528943 x
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