All About Monkeys: A Learning Basket

Recently my girls decided they wanted to learn everything they could about monkeys. And not just monkeys, all primates.

We went to the library and checked out books about monkeys, chimpanzees, and gorillas. We got both fiction and nonfiction.

Then we settled in for a day all about monkeys.

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I filled a basket with all the supplies we would need for our projects and wrote down all the projects we were going to try.

We started by reading. We read as many books as we could handle, then we moved on to our projects. (See Amazon carousel below for book recommendations.)

Next, we made little books to remember what we learned.

We drew pictures of what monkeys ate, where they lived, and even traced our hands since monkeys have similar hands to ours.

The booklets were simple. I cut pieces of brown construction paper in half, and then folded each of those halves in half. I sandwiched two together and then stapled them along the folds.

We also did a fun hand print craft that I found on Red Ted Art. They turned out so cute!

Next we made monkey masks. I was inspired by this paper plate craft on Learn Create Love. Here’s what we did.

Supplies Needed:

Paper plate
Brown paint
Brown construction paper
Glue
Scissors
Large craft stick

We painted our paper plate brown.

While they were drying, we cut our mouth and ears out of brown construction paper.

We traced a sour cream lid for the mouth circle and the lid to one of my spice bottles for the ears.

After the paint was dry, I helped the girls by cutting out the eye holes.

The girls glued their mouth and ears onto their paper plates and used a black marker to add the details.

They also glued a craft stick onto the bottom of their masks so that they could hold it up to their face. Then it was time to run around and act like monkeys – OohOohAahAah!