Animals Everywhere

For ages 5–7, build the big picture that animals live all over the world — on land, in water, and in the air — on every continent including icy Antarctica, and that each kind is found where it fits. Anchor on a world map/globe, start from the familiar (garden, farm, park) and widen outward to extreme places (deep ocean, polar ice, hot desert), so the recurring 'even here?!' reveal does the conceptual work. Seed 'suited to its place' lightly with one obvious pairing, without teaching the adaptation mechanism (a later topic). Picture-exploration is the main scaffold; a drag-to-sort activity adds active commitment, and a brief sort/match can check recall.

• Believing animals only live where the child has seen them (the garden, the zoo, the farm) — missing that animals inhabit the whole planet, including places the child will never visit.
• Thinking nowhere as harsh as Antarctica, the deep sea or the desert could have animals — 'nothing lives there'.
• Using 'animal' to mean only furry mammals or pets, excluding fish, birds, insects and minibeasts from the category.
• Assuming an animal could live just anywhere — not yet noticing that a fish needs water or a polar bear needs cold; the 'suited to its place' idea has to be pointed out.
• Confusing where an animal is kept (a zoo, a farm) with where its kind naturally lives in the world.

• A world map / globe with animals placed on their continents and in their realms (land, sea, sky) — the canonical organising picture.
• A three-realm sort (land / water / air) as the simplest scaffold for 'where animals live'.
• Familiar-to-far zoom: the child's own locale expanding out to oceans, poles and deserts, each revealing its animals.
• Simple 'this animal fits here' pairings (polar bear + ice, camel + desert, fish + water) as a first, gentle taste of suited-to-place.

• Anchor on a big world map or globe and populate it together — the recurring 'even here?' reveal (animals in the freezing Antarctic, the deep sea, the driest desert) is what builds the core idea that animals live EVERYWHERE, not just where the child has been.
• Sort by the three broad realms the child can see — land, water, air — before any finer habitat talk; this matches the KS1 evidence statement and gives a simple, memorable frame.
• Start from the familiar and widen outward (garden → farm → country → ocean → poles) so children attach new animals to places they already know, countering the belief that animals only live where they personally have seen them.
• Introduce 'suited to where it lives' with a single vivid, obvious pairing (thick-furred animal in the cold, webbed feet in water) and stop there — the mechanism of adaptation is a later topic; here it is just noticing that the animal 'fits' its place.
• Use rich real imagery and short wonder-facts rather than definitions; at 5–7 the goal is broad recognition and curiosity, not classification rules.