Learning the animals can be great fun for young learners. Our first graders worked on different activities designed to contribute to the consolidation of the animal vocabulary they had already been taught.

This worksheet included an exercise with the names of some animals and their pictures in which students had to fill in the missing vowels. In another exercise, students were given the names of some animals with their pictures and were supposed to fill in the missing consonants. Through this type of activities, students have the opportunity to practise phonics sounds. Phonics should be a strong component of all kindergarten and 1st grade instruction so that students build strong word attack skills as a foundation for all of their reading skills. A "spot the difference" exercise was also designed and students were asked to find five differences between the two pictures. The aim of this exercise is to reinforce students' observation skills which are of great importance. The last exercise of the worksheet was a 'join the dots' activity. Students were supposed to join the lower-case alphabet letters and draw a picture of a dog. Students enjoyed all these different types of activities and had fun.

We also listened to some relevant songs such as 'Let's Go To The Zoo'. This song leaves plenty of space for young learners to move about the room, acting as their favourite animals. At the end, we played a game in order to practise and revise animal vocabulary in a motivating and engaging way. Pictures of six animals were put on the board. Numbers 1-6 were written on different pieces of paper for the children to pull out of a box when it was their turn, say which animal corresponds to that number and make a sentence about this specific animal (e.g 'It is a duck'). Through this game, our young learners were given the opportunity to form short sentences using the third person singular of the verb 'to be' and revise the animals. We are all looking forward to our next project.