Moose Tracks

Moose was a recent storytime theme. A great introduction to this theme is with a nonfiction book with a few facts to share with the children.  Moose by Grace Hansen works well for preschoolers with its brief text and wonderful color photographs.

A picture book that helped describe the size of a moose was Ernest, The Moose Who Doesn’t Fit by Catherine Rayner. The book ends with a foldout page that shows how big Ernest really is.

The children really enjoyed the humorous book Moose Tracks which led into our science activity with animal tracks.

I began with a brief overview of the book Wild Tracks by by Jim Arnosky. This book features fold out, life size drawings of a variety of animal tracks, including moose. There are  details on how to interpret the footprints as well.

 

For visuals I used animal track identification sheets from the State of Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.  These printable sheets include ten images of common Minnesota animals and the life sized tracks they make.

I printed out color images of a moose, bear, wolf, raccoon, squirrel and wild turkey to display and handed out a variety of laminated footprints: one per child. The children enjoyed figuring out which tracks to match to each animal.

They compared the footprint they had to the others and determined if it was the smallest, next smallest, largest or not quite as large or looked different such as the turkey footprint. They noticed the difference between the moose hooves and the bear claws to determine which tracks belonged to each animal.

Here is a link to the animal tracks pdf:  http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/education_safety/education/project_wild/animal-tracks.pdf

For more information about animal tracks:

Animal Tracks & Signs by Jinny Johnson.

 

Best Foot Forward: Exploring Feet, Flippers and Claws by Ingo Arndt.