Teacher Resources
Connect your learners to popular classroom topics like food webs, habitats, and more.
Educator guides
Whether you need to prepare your students for a Zoo field trip or need an activity for your homeschooler, we have you covered. Designed to enhance lessons in biology, zoology, and ecology, these resources will help connect your learners to wildlife.
Exhibit exploration overview
The exhibit exploration overview is a great place to start. Exhibits are paired with multiple life science topics so that each stop on your Zoo visit can reinforce your lesson.
Zoo vocabulary
Zoo vocabulary offers a handy list of terms to support science and environmental literacy.
Supplemental sources
Supplemental sources provides suggestions for books and websites we love.
Zoo field trip FAQs
Zoo field trip FAQs will help you prepare for a visit—from how to reserve a field trip date to where to eat lunch.
Activities
These fun, science-based activities will help support your wildlife lessons. Use them as pre-visit excitement-builders, post-visit reminders, fun assessment tools, or as rainy-day fun with your family. Activities are grouped by grade level, but can be used however you like.
Grades 1 & 2
Featuring engaging worksheets like group the vertebrates, scavenger hunt, animals of Africa, and handy student explorer logs.
Grades 3
Featuring unique activities like Thumbs Up!, wonder of webs, animath, and Insect Zoo word search.
Wild about art & science
Use these lessons to enhance student learning in science and provide an outlet for artistic creativity. Each lesson is designed to meet Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and provide grade-appropriate lessons and activities that focus on California biodiversity. Each grade focuses on a different animal lesson and is encouraged to create artwork inspired by the animal they studied. The same lessons will be used each year so teachers can plan ahead and work the activities into their lesson plans.
Playground learning guides
At the San Francisco Zoo we believe in the power of play, and at our one-of-a-kind Friend Family Playground, there are opportunities to learn around every branch, iceberg, and stream.
