Different animals move in different ways. Some walk or run on legs. Some fly with wings. Some swim with fins or flippers. Some slither, crawl, hop, or swing through trees. The way an animal moves is connected to where it lives and how its body is built.
Act out different animal movements — hop like a frog, slither like a snake, flap like a bird. Watch videos of animals moving in different environments. Sort animal pictures by how they move (walk, fly, swim, slither).
Animals are always on the move — searching for food, running from danger, finding a mate, or exploring their world. But not every animal moves the same way. How an animal moves depends on where it lives and what kind of body it has.
Animals that live on land often have legs. Dogs, cats, horses, and elephants all walk and run on four legs. Humans, birds, and kangaroos walk or hop on two legs. Insects scurry around on six legs. Spiders creep on eight. Some land animals have no legs at all — snakes slither along the ground by pushing their muscles and belly scales against the surface. It looks slow, but some snakes can move very fast!
Animals that live in water need to move differently. Fish have fins and a tail that they wave side to side to swim. Whales and dolphins have flippers and a big tail they pump up and down. Octopuses squirt water out of their bodies like a jet to zoom backward. Jellyfish pulse their bell-shaped bodies to bob through the sea.
Animals that move through the air need wings. Birds flap their feathered wings to fly, soar, or glide. Bats (which are mammals, not birds) fly with wings made of thin skin stretched between long finger bones. Insects like butterflies, dragonflies, and bees have thin, see-through wings that beat incredibly fast.
Some animals are champions of more than one style. A frog swims in water, hops on land, and some tree frogs even glide through the air. A duck walks, swims, and flies. An animal's body gives it the tools to move, and those tools match the places where it needs to go.