Zippity Zoo Party
By Lee Crawley
Turn your classroom into a "Zoo" for the afternoon!
Invitations
Make giraffe invitations by cutting paper into the shape of a giraffe's head and neck, leaving tabs at the bottom as shown. Cut a square of paper for the cage, and make a slit in it through which the giraffe's head will go. The tabs will keep the giraffe from sliding out of its cage.
On the giraffe's neck, write the time, location of your party and your name. Decorate around your writing to make the paper look like a giraffe. On the cage, write "Come to a Zippity Zoo Party!"
Decorations
For place cards, use boxes of animal crackers. Tag each box with "Zoo Keeper" followed by a guest's name, and put a box at each place.
With felt-tip pens, draws animal faces on balloons. Arrange them around the room. Hang streamers on the walls to look like the bars of a cage. Tape the streamers to the top of the wall, twist them, and tape them to the bottom of the wall. Place stuffed animals around the room.
Refreshments
Put a small paper bag filled with popcorn at each student's place. Decorate a cake with animal crackers, using lines of icing to suggest cages. Or make cupcakes, and decorate each one with a bear's footprint. Place a circle of icing on the cupcake, and put five little dots of icing around one side of the circle. Use a toothpick to draw claws from the dots.
Serve Penguin Punch--fruit juice or ginger ale with a scoop of orange sherbet in each glass.
Games
Who's Who at the Zoo
For each student, write the name of a zoo animal on a sheet of paper. Pin a paper to each student's back without letting him or her see it. Each person tries to find out what animal tag he or she is wearing bu asking questions that can be answered only with yes or no. Continue until all students have guessed their animal.
Feed the Bear
Cut some fish shapes out of cellulose sponges, making each about 2 1/2 inches long. Decorate a cardboard shoe box to look like a bear, and cut a 4-inch-wide hole in the box top for its mouth.
Lay a piece of string on the floor behind which the players must stand. Each student takes a turn trying to toss the sponge fishes into the bear's mouth.
Zoo Keeper Training
Good zoo keepers remember where the animals are. Can you? Cut forty 3-inch squares from plain paper for every three or four students. Write a different animal name on every two squares, until you have twenty pairs of cards in each deck. Shuffle each deck. Place the cards facedown in five rows of eight cards each.
Each student in turn flips over any two cards. If the cards match, he or she keeps the pair and takes another turn. If not, the student turns the cards facedown and the next student tries. The goal is to end up with the most pairs.
