Lesson video

Hi, team, and welcome to another lesson with me, Mrs. Garrard.

I'm so excited to see you again.

In today's lesson, we are going to learn all about animal life cycles.

Let me share my screen.

So the first thing we'll need to do is gather some resources because we're going to create a baby animal at the end of our lesson.

The next thing we will do is look at animal life cycles, and then finally we'll make our creation.

For this lesson, you will need your listening ears and your looking eyes.

You'll need an egg box, some scissors, pipe cleaners, and some pom-poms, some paint, some glue, and some googly eyes.

If you don't have googly eyes, no big deal.

You can just draw the eyes of your animal on some paper, cut it out and then stick it on.

Pause the video now to gather your resources.

Once you're ready and you have everything you need, come back and press play.

Great, now you're ready.

Let's start to think about some animals and their life cycles.

The first animal we're going to learn about is the chicken.

The chicken's life cycle starts off with the female chicken, the hen laying a fertilised egg.

She'll lay her egg in a nest, and then she has to sit on the egg to keep it warm.

She sits on it for 21 days.

That's called incubating.

My turn, incubate.

Your turn, incubate.

That means the hen sits on the egg to keep it warm.

That's incubating.

She sits on her egg for 21 days and then the chick inside the egg is ready to hatch.

The chick has a special pointy, sharp beak with a tooth on the end called an egg tooth.

The egg tooth drops off very shortly after the chick has hatched.

But while it's in the egg, the chick uses the tooth to chip away at the inside of the egg.

As it does that, it turns itself around so that it chips away the top of the egg.

It looks a bit like the top of the egg has been zipped off.

That part of hatching is called unzipping.

The chick unzips the egg by chipping away at the inside.

When it's chipped away all around, it uses strong legs to push the eggshell apart and hatches out.

Then we have our chick already hatched.

Over the next few weeks, the chick starts to grow and change a little bit.

It starts to grow feathers.

When the chick is first hatched, it's a little bit wet.

Once it's dried off, it has fluffy yellow fluff all over its body.

It's not feathers yet, but over the next six weeks, the chick will start to grow feathers, and then it will look just like its parents.

So that's the life cycle of a chicken.

First a hen lays an egg, she incubates the egg, and then it hatches into a chick.

The chick grows up and becomes a hen or a cockerel.

A cockerel is a male, a boy chicken.

The female chicken is called a hen and the male chicken is called a cockerel.

So that's the life cycle of a chicken.

Let's move on to our next- Oh, look.

Did you know that all of these animals hatched from eggs? There's a penguin.

A penguin hatches from an egg, but it doesn't have a nest.

In order to keep warm, it doesn't want to be, the egg can't be on the ice, the egg sits on top of the, it's normally the daddy penguin, sits on top of the male penguin's feet so that it doesn't touch the ice and get cold.

The penguin has a special pouch.

This is an emperor penguin.

It has a special pouch that it puts over the top of the egg to keep it warm.

That's how it incubates the egg.

And then the baby penguin chick hatches out.

The next picture is of some mallard ducklings.

They're ducks, they're ducklings.

The breed.

the type of duck they are is a mallard.

The next picture is of some cygnets.

Hmm, I wonder what cygnets will grow into.

Tell the screen if you know.

You're right, cygnet is a word for a baby swan.

These animals, the cygnets will grow up to be swans.

Underneath the picture of the penguin, there's a picture of a platypus.

That's a type of animal that lives in Australia, and a platypus hatches from an egg, too.

Didn't know that.

The next animal is a crocodile.

Crocodiles also hatch from eggs.

The mummy crocodile digs a big, deep hole in the sand.

She lays her egg in the sand and buries them again, and the sand keeps them warm.

The sand incubates the eggs.

And then when they're ready, they hatch and the little crocodiles, the hatchlings have to dig their way out of the sand.

That's the same for a turtle.

You see the last picture is of a sea turtle.

The mother sea turtle will come onto the land and use her front flippers to dig a hole to lay her eggs in.

She covers them back up.

She flicks the sand back over them with her back flippers.

And the sand does the same job, it incubates them, just like the crocodiles.

And when the babies are ready and they're ready to hatch, they hatch out of the eggs and dig their way out of the sand.

Then they have to make their way to the sea.

I didn't know all of those animals hatched from eggs, too.

Did you? the animal that we're going to look at the life cycle of is a frog.

There's the mummy frog right at the top.

And the mummy frog lays frogspawn.

My turn, frogspawn.

Your turn, frogspawn.

Frogspawn is lots of eggs all together, and she lays lots of this frogspawn at the same time.

It looks a little bit like jelly with black dots in the middle.

After some time, the frogspawn hatches into tadpoles.

Can you see the tadpole at the bottom of the screen? It has a tail and a round body.

There's the tadpole.

Over time, the tadpoles begin to grow legs and lose their tails, and then they become froglets.

Froglets don't have a tail anymore.

The picture on the screen shows it just has a little bit of tail, but it has its back legs and its front legs.

And then eventually the tail disappears altogether and it becomes a frog.

So first the mummy frog lays her frogspawn, the frogspawn hatches into, oh, what was that special word? Tadpoles, yeah, you're right, tadpoles.

The frogspawn hatches into tadpoles.

And then finally the tadpoles turn into froglets.

Their tail disappears and they grow back legs and front legs and they become froglets.

Oh, the next animal that we're going to look at is an insect.

It's a butterfly.

The life cycle of a butterfly is that their butterfly, the mother butterfly, the female butterfly will lay some eggs on a leaf.

And she's really clever.

She always chooses a leaf that her caterpillars will like to eat.

So she lays her eggs on the leaf and a caterpillar will hatch from the egg.

The caterpillar spends all of its time eating.

The caterpillar then, when it's big enough, spins a cocoon around itself.

and the caterpillar inside the cocoon transforms into a butterfly.

That's the life cycle of a butterfly.

First the butterfly lays an egg, the egg hatches into a caterpillar, you're right, a caterpillar.

And the Caterpillar spins a, what's the name of that thing? Oh, a cocoon.

A caterpillar spins a cocoon around itself.

When it's inside, it transforms into a butterfly.

Now that we've learned about some life cycles of different creatures, it's time for us to make a creature or an animal of our own, a baby animal.

While I was looking at the slides, I thought that the baby turtle was my favourite, so I decided that I would make a baby turtle.

Watch the video and listen carefully to the instructions that I give on how to make a baby turtle.

So the first thing that I did was find my egg box and a pipe cleaner and my googly eyes and my pom-pom.

I gathered all of the things I'll need.

And my glue.

And I got some scissors, and I just need one part of the egg box.

Can you see, there are one, two, three, four, five, six compartments that the eggs normally fit in.

I need just one of those.

So I'm going to cut it out.

It's a little bit tricky, so you might need to ask an adult to help you, especially if you're new to using scissors.

This is a tricky job.

And you see it's a little bit fiddly.

So I'm cutting out just one of the egg cup compartments, and I'm going to neaten it up by trimming around the edge so that it will stand flat on the surface.

So I'm just using my scissors to trim around the edge.

This is going to be the shell of my baby turtle.

Nearly neat enough to be able to stand on the surface.

And there we go.

Move those bits out of the way.

Now, the next thing I'm going to need to do is paint the shell of my turtle.

So I've chosen a dark green.

Once I've covered the surface of the egg box with the paint, I'm going to need to wait for it to dry.

So I'll have to put it to one side and be a little bit patient and wait for it to dry.

There we go.

I think that's all covered.

So are my fingers.

Once it's dry, I used some glue to stick my pom-pom on on as the little turtle's head, and I cut my pipe cleaner into four pieces and I twisted them together to make the flippers of the turtle.

And I'm going to stick them, I'm going to use tape because I don't have very long to wait for it to dry, but you could use glue if you wanted to use glue.

Another way is to use tape.

I'm sticking them on the inside of the egg carton shell, two on one side and two on the other.

See how I bend them in half and twist them so that they look like little flippers.

And then fit them inside the shell and twist them out a little bit to make them look like flippers and help the turtle to stand up.

And the final thing to do is to add my googly eyes.

Remember, if you don't have googly eyes, no big deal.

You can just draw some eyes on a piece of paper and cut them out, stick them on.

So I'm popping a little blob of glue on the front of my turtle and then sticking on the eyes.

One.

Two.

And then I think I'm going to add some patterns to my shell of my turtle.

So I'm going to choose a light green and put some markings on the shell of my turtle.

And you see some little markings on the side with light green paint.

You could decorate your turtle however you would like.

You could even choose a different colour if you wanted to.

Let me show you a picture of my completed turtle.

Can you see him? He's tiny.

So let's go through the life cycle of a turtle.

Remember, the mother turtle, she normally lives in the sea, but when she's ready to lay her eggs, she comes onto the shore and she uses her flippers to dig a hole or a nest in the sand where she lays her eggs.

The eggs are incubated by the warm sand.

And when the turtles are ready, the baby turtles inside the eggs are ready, they hatch, and then they dig their way out of the sand and make their way towards the sea.

That's where they'll grow into an adult turtle, maybe a mummy or daddy turtle.

It depends.

That's where they'll grow.

Team, you might decide to make a baby turtle just like me.

You might decide to make another animal that we've talked about the life cycle of.

You might make an egg box frog, or you might make a chick.

It's up to you.

It's now time for me to say goodbye.

But if you would like to show your work with Oak National, you can do that by asking a parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and hashtag LearnwithOak.

That way I'll get to see if you decide to make a turtle or a different creature.

Really looking forward to finding out what you decide to make.

That brings us to the end of our lesson today.

Really enjoyed learning about animal life cycles with you, and I can't wait to see you all again soon.

Bye for now.