This printable worksheet features the shapes of tracks for 12 forest animals: deer, skunk, fox, rabbit, weasel, porcupine, mouse, coyote, raccoon, chipmunk, bobcat, and grey squirrel.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This resource is easy to differentiate and use for many types of lessons and learning experiences.
Visual learners or students who aren't yet fluent readers will do well with this resource.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should have some prior knowledge about forest animals and animal tracks.
Differentiation
Cross-curricular connections can be made in social studies classes discussing animal tracking in history or in math classes working on patterns.
This resource would make a fun game of matching, where students match the tracks to a picture of the animal. Pairs of students can check each other's work.
For a fun outdoor activity, cut out each track and use chalk to trace the "tracks" on a paved surface or have students look for the animal tracks outside after it rains or snows.
Scientist Notes
This is a template containing animal footprints. It is suitable for students to acquaint themselves should they need to engage in a local field expedition.
Standards
Science
LS3: Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits
1.LS3.1 Make observations to construct an evidence-based account that young plants and animals are like, but not exactly like, their parents.
3.LS3.1 Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and that variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms.
3.LS3.2 Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.
LS4: Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
3.LS4.3 Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
