Check out these fun learning activities for kids!
Our Learning Team have come up with some fun resources for kids to help beat the boredom at home!
Kia ora kaiako, want your students to visit the Zoo from your online classroom? Talk to us about a virtual Zoo Learning Session! From webinars with your class to interactive activities with our Educators, we are keen to work with you to make a virtual Zoo experience part of your students’ learning during this time. Contact learning@wellingtonzoo.com
Wellington Zoo is a proud partner of Weta Digital, who have been supporting the Zoo, and our community, for nearly a decade. Together we have brought the fascinating lives of Chimpanzees to our local community and the world.
We are excited to share with you Weta Digital’s Creative Art Director, Gino Acevedo. Gino has created a special draw-along activity video for you to create your own detailed Chimpanzee mask at home. Gino is an artist extraordinaire who has worked with Weta Workshop and Weta Digital for over 20 years on major blockbuster films including Avatar, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings films and many others. As the Creative Art Director for the Planet of The Apes series, and a big fan of our primate relatives, he knows a thing or two about how to draw them!
Join Gino in this special video to learn how to draw and colour your very own Chimpanzee mask, and learn some of our favorite facts about our relatives along the way.
At Wellington Zoo we give the animals a lot of enrichment to keep them happy, healthy, and keep their lives interesting. It’s the animal equivalent of having books to read, TV to watch, games, sports or musical instruments to play.
But it isn’t just something that happens at the Zoo. While we are all at home, we can make enrichment for our animals as well! Making enrichment is fun for us and fun for our pets. We can get really creative and make some exciting and challenging activities that they will love.
How to make dog ice blocks or 'pupsicles'
Ingredients:
Method:
Be sure to check with an adult to see if your pet has any known allergies first.
Now that you’re spending a lot of time at home, you have the chance to be like a Zoo Keeper! Use this activity to observe the animals at your home just like the Keepers do at Wellington Zoo; you might find out their favourite sleeping spot, when they like to be awake, or even who they like to spend the most time with!
Download our animal behaviour activity and see what trends you can find in your animal’s behaviour.
Wellington Zoo is lucky enough to care for some incredible animals and it’s important for our Keepers to get to know the individuals they look after. This means our Keepers spend a lot of time studying their animals and getting to know them, to learn how they usually behave and why.
So until you’re able to come to the Zoo to meet our animals, we have created a resource to help you observe the animals in your own backyard!
While the animals at Wellington Zoo are being well taken care of by our amazing Zoo Keepers, why not create some zoo friends at home? Have yourself a crafternoon and make your favourite Wellington Zoo animal (or any other). You could even design a new habitat for your animal, or create an entire zoo! Remember they need somewhere warm to sleep, somewhere to eat and drink, and somewhere to play.
We’ve come up with a few suggestions to get you started, based on some of the amazing animals at Wellington Zoo!
Tamariki, Wellington Zoo wants to hear from you! Do you know some cool facts about Cheetahs you’re just racing to share? Are you itching to find out what Sasa our Sun Bear has for supper? Then why not become Pen Pals with one of our Zoo Keepers!
We love hearing from you and we also LOVE sharing the pictures you have drawn with our animals.
So take a picture of your art work, email us a letter, or send us a video with your questions to learning@wellingtonzoo.com. One of our super star Zoo Keepers will read out some of your letters to your favourite animals!
Jigsaw Puzzles made using www.jigsawexplorer.com
Print and colour in your favourite Wellington Zoo animals!
Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre
Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research