Animal Photo Cards {Drawing or Building Activity}

When it comes to drawing, building with LEGO bricks, or other creative pursuits, sometimes kids just need a little inspiration to get their brains and hands going. These printable animal photo cards are just the thing to provide that creative spark!

There are so many ways to use this set of animal cards! I’ll show you how they can be used, and then you can grab your own free set of animal photo cards at the bottom of this post.

If you like this resource, you’ll also want to check out our Famous Landmark Building Cards!

There are 20 Animal Cards to print. They are all different pictures, although we did two cards with gorillas because we had photos of an adult and a juvenile. These pictures were taken by myself and my 14 year old son. We went to two different zoos and an aquarium to collect all the pictures! We had so much fun with this because we love nature photography! We both have DSLR cameras and large zoom lenses – essential for getting shots like this.

Each card has the name of the animal. I made the photos as large as possible on the cards, but on the cards where extra space was unavoidable, I added animal facts.

How to Use the Animal Cards

There are so many ways to use these printable animal cards! Here are some suggestions.

• Use them as drawing inspiration. Seeing a photo of the animal helps kids get better proportions.
• Use them for building inspiration with LEGO bricks, K’Nex, wood blocks, and more.
• Use them to build animals on the fridge using magnetic tiles (like MagnaTiles).
• Write stories about the animals on the cards.
• Choose a card and write a report about that animal.
• Play “Who Am I?” by giving one animal fact at a time and having another person guess. For example, “I have feathers,” or “I like to eat leaves.”
• Use the cards to encourage language development in young children. Talk about what type of animal it is, the colors, etc.

Building LEGO animals is so much fun with real animals to look at! In fact, we always use photos when building LEGO animals for this website or for our books.

My 12 year old son designed this LEGO lemur using the picture card!

Here’s another look at the LEGO lemur.

And here’s a little tiger that I built. 🙂 Build a whole zoo using these cards as inspiration!

I laminated our cards to make them more durable, especially since we were out of card stock.

Make your own building station by printing the cards and adding a box of LEGO bricks! Or set out the cards along with paper and colored pencils.

Ready to print your Animal Cards?

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If you like this activity, you’ll also want to check out our Famous Landmark Building Cards!

Print 28 cards with photos of landmarks from around the world. These are great for LEGO building, and also for any type of building toy or as drawing inspiration.