Critter Camp (Week 1) - Land Animals

The Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum kicked off the start of summer the first week of June with Critter Camp. Kindergartners and first graders came to the museum to learn about the many different animals that live on our planet. The first week of Critter Camp, we learned about land animals. The kids learned how different land animals eat, move, and use their senses to survive through games and activities.

For our first round of activities, the kids learned the different ways land animals can eat their food. The different eating strategies include scavenging and digging for food, scooping up food with a beak, sucking up food, and catching food with a sticky tongue! To imitate and get a better understanding of these eating strategies the kids scavenged for sticker animals in paper bedding, sucked up M&M’s with straws and moved them into a cup, picked up chickpeas with tweezers, and caught paper flies with sticky hands!

For the second round of activities, the kids learned about the different senses land animals use to survive in their environments. These senses included touch, sound, sight, and smell. To learn about these different senses, we felt inside mystery boxes using our sense of touch to discover what was inside, listened to different animal sounds, compared pictures of how humans see things to how animals see things and met a live lizard, snake, and tarantula to learn about the different ways land animals can smell.

Finally, to end our first day of Critter Camp we learned about the different ways land animals move. As a group, we slithered like snakes, galloped liked horses, climbed like monkeys, waddled like penguins, and hopped like kangaroos. To master these different movements each child took a turn acting out a movement while everyone else had to guess what animal they were moving like. The kids went home with lots of new knowledge about land animals and the fun prizes they earned throughout the day. 

On the second day of Critter Camp- land edition, we went exploring! The kids were troopers as we hiked up Rock Canyon and Big Springs Trail in Provo, in search of land animals. While hiking we were able to find a deer, a squirrel, and lots of different insects. Jonas, one of our amazing educators also found a snake that we were all able to look at! When we discovered a new animal the kids were able to draw and color our findings in their own field guides! We returned home tired but happy with the discoveries we had made!