Looking for new ways to explore and understand more about habitats of animals and other living things? With these animal habitat worksheets and anchor chart ideas, students will:

explore the temperature and climate of different animal habitats
understand that animals in habitats have adaptations that help them survive
identify how a habitat provides the basic needs for plants and animals

Activities and Resources to Teach Animal Habitats

Explore Animal Habitats

If students have pets that they take care of, they may be familiar with helping animals meet their needs in a habitat.

Introduce Vocabulary

Help students begin to understand the characteristics of different habitats with vocabulary and pocket chart cards. Students can sort the pictures of plants and animals to determine which habitat they belong to. Students can keep track of their new learning in their science notebooks to refer to throughout the unit.

Identify the habitats of animals with interactive science notebook pages

Animal Habitat Research

Give students an opportunity to dive deeper into their favorite habitat with a research activity. I love using PebbleGO for student research because the information is organized into categories and each page can be read to accommodate the needs of different students. If you don’t have access to PebbleGO, you can find additional resources below.

Identify How Habitats Provide Basic Needs

Have a class discussion to help students understand that in order for living things to survive, their habitat needs to provide all the basic needs like food, water, and shelter.

A book called A Home for the Winter to research about animal habitats

Create an Animal Habitat

Students can take the information that they learned from their habitat research to create their own animal habitat. Students can write to describe how their habitat provides the basic needs to the animals that live there.

What to include in the animal habitat:

habitat plants
animals
water source
food source
shelter

Animal Adaptations

By now, students are beginning to see the special characteristics that animals have that help them survive in their habitat.

Describe and Label Adaptations

I love using the book series, What if You Have Animal Parts, to help students learn more about different adaptations. Students can practice describing and labeling animal adaptations with these independent practice activities.

A book called What if You had Animal Eyes? to learn about ocean animal adaptations

Guess the Habitat

Have fun wrapping up the unit with an engaging guessing game. Students will look at a zoomed in picture of a habitat. Students will use all that they learned to make a guess. Display the answer for students to check to see if they were correct.

Wrap-Up

With these activities, you’ll keep the engagement alive from the beginning to the end of your unit.

Research and create an animal habitat that provides the animals with all of their basic needs.
Explore the adaptations of animals with engaging books and activities.

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