Reading Comprehension about Kindness and Friendship

I am excited to present another enriching reading comprehension project for young English learners: a delightful story about kindness and friendship, featuring an adorable hedgehog named Oliver. This engaging project is designed to help children improve their reading skills while exploring important themes such as love, acceptance, and the joy of connecting with others. In the heart of the forest, Oliver the hedgehog embarks on a heartwarming journey to share hugs with his friends, teaching valuable lessons along the way. This project includes multi-level reading texts, fun activities, and creative worksheets to make learning enjoyable and effective.

"The Hedgehog's Hug" story - reading comprehension text about kindness and friendship - Level 1.

Animals Worksheets: Picture to Word Matching

My printable ESL kits usually have two types of matching worksheets. The animals kit has two of them as well. So I’d like to share some picture-to-word worksheets here.

Buy the whole animals kit in printer-friendly PDF format
The kit includes flashcards, 4 types of worksheets, dominoes and bingo game

The whole animals kit has 31 picture-to-word matching worksheets (including 4 for British English vocabulary) designed to help kids memorize more than 100 animal names. ESL and EFL teachers can use these worksheets to introduce such types of animals as pets, farm animals, polar animals, sea animals, Australian animals, African animals, reptiles, birds, insects.

Animals Worksheets: Word to Picture Matching

I traditionally create printable word-to-picture matching worksheets for major topics we learn in the classroom. My recent animals kit also contains such worksheets. I would like to share some of them here.

Buy the whole animals kit in printer-friendly PDF format
The kit includes flashcards, 4 types of worksheets, dominoes and bingo game

The whole animal kit has 23 word-to-picture worksheets including 4 for British English vocabulary. It helps kids memorize more than 100 names of animals in English.

Free Clip Art for Teachers: Forest Animals

When educating kids lots of teachers add visuals to their teaching materials. It's kind of important because little children learn things about the world mostly from visual perception of objects around them. It is not always possible to show real physical objects or living beings in the classroom, and describing them with mere words without showing at least a simple picture may be a futile attempt to teach something to little ones. Necessity of visual materials like clip art and flashcards is a fact of life for preschool teachers like myself. After all pictures are a great fun for children and having fun during lessons with small kids is a key to the educational success. Unfortunately, not all my fellow teachers and parents can draw and use graphic editing software or have high quality clip art available for them free of charge. That's why I decided to share some free educational clip art I have in my teacher's collection. In my first post related to clip art I would like to share a few cute cartoon images drawn by my husband for my forest animals song video.

Watch the forest animals song video on Youtube

My husband is not a big artist but at least he can draw better than I can and his drawings are just good enough to be used for my English lessons with kindergarten kids. You too can use these kid-appealing pictures for creating your own worksheets, flashcards, posters, games, newsletters, PowerPoint presentations, homework pages, school websites and other teachers' stuff to make your lessons and overall teaching activities more informative, engaging and fruitful.

Well, as I said in this first clip art post I offer my fellow educators some royalty free pictures of funny looking cartoon forest animals including bear, beaver, bird, butterfly, deer, fox, frog, hare, hedgehog, mole, snake, squirrel, and wolf.

Cartoon wolf clip art

Forest Animals Worksheets

A lot of teachers need worksheets to make their work easier and lessons more interesting. However, not many educators have time and abilities to create worksheets by their own. So they are often looking for printable teaching materials online. I am lucky to have learned how to use graphic editing software to make all kinds of worksheets for my teaching purposes. I totally understand the problem of thousands of teachers around the world who experience shortage of visuals as they are too busy to dedicate their time for designing good-looking printables. That is why I decided to share worksheets, flashcards and coloring pages I had created to teach English to kids at the kindergarten where I work here in Ukraine. So I hope that teachers, educators and parents from around the globe will find my materials useful. You can find all posts containing free printables in this blog following this link.

Watch the Forest Animals video on Youtube

Here are worksheets which go with my recently announced Forest Animals song:

Forest animals matching letters and pictures worksheet

Forest animals matching words and pictures worksheet

Forest Animals Song for Kids

I think there is no a child in the whole world who doesn’t love animals. That’s why I decided to create a new song about our children's animal friends. This time my song features animals living in the forest. From the very childhood people meet forest animal characters in children’s stories and fairy-tales. The most lucky kids can observe wildlife in animals' habitat or in a zoo. My 3,5 years old son loves all kinds of animals but for the time being we have no chance to visit at least a zoo as we live in a relatively small town where there is no way to see real wild animals. Anyway, I do believe that animals are the most exciting and appealing creatures in children's life. That's why I hope that kids from all over the world will love my song. The cute thing about the song video is that my little son sings the last refrain. This video was created by our entire family. I had written lyrics and music, then I sang the song with my son and my husband created animal images and the animation for the following video.

Watch the Forest Animals song video on Youtube

My song introduces animals of middle latitudes. They are common both in European and North American forests. While listening to my song and working with a great variety of worksheets, which I would like to share with educators from all over the world in my next posts, children will learn names of forest animals in English as well as facts about where these animals live and what they can do.

So here are the Forest Animals song lyrics:

1
Discover who lives in the forest
In the heart of a deep, green forest,
In the holes and in the trees
I can easily tell you this.

Refrain:
Foxes and bears,
Squirrels and hares,
Wolves, snakes, and birds.
Moles and deer,
Hedgehogs and beavers,
Butterflies and frogs.

2
Discover who lives in the forest
In the heart of a deep, green forest,
On the ground and in the air,
Animals everywhere.

They run very fast
And hide in the grass,
Walk, jump and crawl.
They swim in the river
And fly with no fear
Let’s name them all:

Refrain:
Foxes and bears,
Squirrels and hares,
Wolves, snakes, and birds.
Moles and deer,
Hedgehogs and beavers,
Butterflies and frogs.

See also:
Forest Animals Coloring Pages and Flashcards
Forest Animals Worksheets