Animal Exploration Lab for Kids: 52 Family-friendly Activities for Learning About the Amazing Animal Kingdom

Animal Exploration Lab for Kids is every young zoologist’s go-to guide to the wonderful world of animals.

This hands-on, interactive, family-friendly animal reference guide features fun activities designed to enhance your understanding of, and love for, the animal kingdom as you:

• Explore the techniques that researchers use to study animals
• Investigate the adaptations and behaviors that make animals so unique
• Study how animals sense and respond to the world around them
• Discover new ways to support and conserve your amazing animal neighbors

Practical experiments inspire observations of nature and the animals that surround us. For example, in Unit 1 you’ll use a trail camera to document animals around your home and in Unit 2, you’ll examine the usefulness of blubber in keeping polar animals warm. With this book you’ll not just learn about animal forms, functions, and behaviors, but also how to respect and care for them.

Each lab in the book is designed to help you build new knowledge and skills around animal science and are broken into the following sections:

• Safety Tips & Helpful Hints provides additional guidelines and insights for successfully conducting each lab.
• Procedure provides details about the individual steps in each lab so you’ll know just what to do.
• Creative Enrichment helps you think about how to take your experiment even further.
• The Science Behind the Fun provides a simple description of the science that supports the lab and other background information.

With Animal Exploration Lab for Kids, you don’t have to take a trip to the zoo to start learning about the animal kingdom.

The popular Lab for Kids series features a growing list of books that share hands-on activities and projects on a wide host of topics, including art, astronomy, clay, geology, math, and even how to create your own circus—all authored by established experts in their fields. Each lab contains a complete materials list, clear step-by-step photographs of the process, as well as finished samples. The labs can be used as singular projects or as part of a yearlong curriculum of experiential learning. The activities are open-ended, designed to be explored over and over, often with different results. Geared toward being taught or guided by adults, they are enriching for a range of ages and skill levels. Gain firsthand knowledge on your favorite topic with Lab for Kids.

Maggie Reinbold is Director of Community Engagement at San Diego Zoo Global, heading up a dynamic team dedicated to designing and implementing programs that connect communities to conservation for the benefit of wildlife and habitats. She is also an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Department of Biology at Miami University, where she teaches the Earth Expedition to the Big Island of Hawaii. Maggie earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biology at San Diego State University, with a focus on the population genetics of desert aquatic insects across the Baja California Peninsula. She has taught science in a number of formal and informal settings, including the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Natural History Museum, Cardiff Elementary School, and San Diego State University. As an National Science Foundation science fellow, she co-taught hands-on science with classroom teachers across San Diego County and also spent several seasons in Arctic Alaska, bringing hands-on science education to unique and underserved communities on the North Slope. She is the co-author of Drawing Wild Animals and author of Animal Exploration Lab for Kids. She lives in Poway, California.