A guide to celebrating animal birthdays
Teachers, you’re already experts in empathy. You model it and nurture it in your classrooms every day. Empathy is also a powerful tool for building connections with animals and nature.
These resources are designed to support you in helping students extend their empathy to wildlife, including the animals that are often overlooked, misunderstood or underappreciated. By encouraging students to take the perspective of individual animals—comparing their lived experiences to that of your students—we can spark curiosity, compassion and a sense of shared responsibility for the natural world.
Birthdays are a great opportunity to celebrate our favorite traits about an animal and give them gifts that they would enjoy. Just like humans, some animals celebrate birthdays, and some don’t. In fact, some animals don’t even have birthdays! That’s because not all animals give live birth. That’s why at the Seattle Aquarium, we also celebrate hatchdays for our friends who entered this world by hatching from an egg.
Also, there are many animals whose exact birthday or hatchday we don’t know. We can still appreciate how wonderful they are. For birds and mammals who have been rescued, animals who have a regular spawning season or animals who are microscopic when they hatch, we can estimate how old they are and pick a day to celebrate them.
No matter when we choose to celebrate, we’re happy to acknowledge these animals and make the day special for them.
The following resources are designed to help with planning a celebration.
Birthday resources
All ages
Calendar
A calendar guide to birthdays, hatchdays and spawning seasons.
Birthday card
A blank birthday card to add a message to and decorate in celebration.
Different ways to enter the world
Information about animals that are hatched, born or somewhere in between.
Pre-K
Circle Time for Animal Birthdays lesson plan
Students will learn about baby animals.
Kinder–Second grade
Animal Birthday Party Planning lesson plan
Plan a celebration with your students. Info sheets for different animals include facts and guiding questions.
Third–Fifth grades
Animal Birthday Party Planning lesson plan
Prepare your students to celebrate animals’ birthdays.
Siesta and Fiesta the blue-spotted stingrays worksheets, Grade 3
Activity pages to guide your students to research rays and prepare a celebration.
Siesta and Fiesta the blue-spotted stingrays worksheets, Grades 4 and 5
Activity pages to guide your students to research rays and prepare a celebration.
Salmon worksheets, Grade 3
Activity pages to guide your students to research salmon and prepare a celebration.
Salmon worksheets, Grades 4 and 5
Activity pages to guide your students to research salmon and prepare a celebration.
Sekiu the sea otter worksheets, Grade 3
Activity pages to guide your students to research sea otters and prepare a celebration.
Sekiu the sea otter worksheets, Grades 4 and 5
Activity pages to guide your students to research sea otters and prepare a celebration.
Share the celebration
If your students create cards or any artwork to celebrate these animals, we would love to see and feature them! Send your pictures to registration@seattleaquarium.org. By sending in pictures, you are permitting the Seattle Aquarium to use them on our webpage and our social media. Please do not include any faces of students.
