Animal Science Snack Craft: A 1st Grade Project

Take your students on a field trip to the nearest zoo. This is best done when studying animals in science class. The next day, have the class make this delicious snack during science class as you go over everything you learned the day before.

Here are the following items you will need for this project:

1. 1 plain cupcake for each student in the class
2. Vanilla icing
3. Greed food coloring
4. Box of animal crackers
5. A large bag of chewable gummy lifesavers
6. A large bag of pretzel sticks
7. A box or two of animal crackers
8. A box of plastic knives
9. A stack of small paper plates
10. A large mixing bowl

Here are the steps you need to follow to create your zoo cupcakes:

1. Have each student lay out a piece of paper over their desk or provide them with a piece of newspaper.
2. Had out one plain undecorated cupcake to each student.
3. Call your students up to your desk and have a few of them empty the vanilla icing in to your big bowl.
4. Have another volunteer add green food coloring to the icing, and another one mix it all together.
5. Hand out a blog of green icing to each student on one of the little paper plates and have them go back to their seat to spread it over the cupcakes with their plastic knives.
6. Go over what you learned at the zoo the day before as the kids work on their cupcakes. You could also read a book about animals to the class.
7. Give each student 5 gummy lifesavers, 10 pretzel sticks, and 1 animal from the animal crackers.
8. Tell the students to first place the lifesavers around the edge of the cupcake. Then have them add 1 pretzel stick through each lifesaver and one inbetween each lifesaver to create an animal cage.
9. Add an animal in the middle of the cupcake to create a cage.
10. Take pictures of the cupcakes and let the kids eat their new creations.

A great book to read this day would be Going to the Zoo by Tom Paxton. You can get it online at Amazon.com if your library doesn't carry it. It only costs $11.55 brand new or $9.80 used.

Make sure you ask questions to each of the kids. One such question would be:

What was your favorite animal and tell one thing you learned about it? They could say bears for example and that they learned bears hibernate in the winter.