Toddler STEM: Animal Diet Classification

Although we don’t intend to do formal schooling with my preschooler, Bo, we still love doing no-prep totschooling activities together. One of Bo’s favorite activities is sorting. She loves sorting colors, numbers, letters, and all manner of other items.

I set up a little sorting activity for her to help her learn what different types of animals eat. This was a fun way to introduce how animals can have different nutritional needs.

Use this activity along with thematic units on animals. It’s the perfect addition to your spring STEM activities!

This activity is one of our favorite technology activities for kids!

No-Prep Toschooling: Animal Diet Classification

For this no-prep totschooling activity, you will need to gather a few different supplies from around the house. This is what we used:

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.  

Supplies

• Little People Farm Animals (or other toy animals)
• Butcher paper
• Crayons
• Animal food (we used grass, red manipulatives, a small cosmetic sponge, popcorn, toy sandwiches, and toy bugs)

I kept the set-up for this activity super simple. I gathered animal food-like items from the kid’s toys and placed them inside six circles (big enough to set the animals in).

I wrote the name of each food inside each circle. I included “lunch” because that is Bo’s favorite meal and she had little farmers as well as animals.

After setting up the circles, I had Bo take the animals and place them inside each circle based on what that animal ate.

Some of the options were open to interpretation, so you can decide for yourself whether a cow, for example, is an eater of grass or grain. We coached Bo on what the animals ate if she placed them in the incorrect circles.

For the most part, however, she was able to classify the animals completely on her own.

Bo had a lot of fun pretending to make the animals eat the food after she classified them. She particularly enjoyed letting the people eat lunch and the bunnies eat grass.

I loved this activity because it was so simple and didn’t take any preparation at all, which is usually essential for preschool projects in our house!