Lesson Plan: Tracks and Signs

One of our Co-ops is focusing on the State of North Carolina this year. It happens to be where we live and is part of the state curriculum for fourth graders. We don't by any means follow the curriculum the state mandates, but it seemed like a good umbrella topic for the year. We have parent members in our group that have a range of specialties and abilities, and so we each take three consecutive weeks and craft some lessons for the group. The end result is everything from dance and art to history and beyond. I seem to be the "science" person so I figured I would do something concerning the nature of our area. 

This is a tough group though. These kids have been to the local museums multiple times and have had all kinds of instruction on the plants and animals of North Carolina, not to mention having spent a great deal of time outdoors in the woods. I thought I would take a page from the realm of applied science and have some fun with them learning about how to find and identify tracks and other things left behind by our forest creatures. 

A great resource for this is a booklet that the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science has on their website called Animal Tracks and Signs. I took many of our activities from this guide and will be taking them to the Museum, itself, in a couple of weeks for an information hunt amongst the "Mountains to the Sea Display". There is also a Curiosity Class on "Animal Tracks and Signs" at the museum but I wasn't able to get in. The museum was completely booked two to three months ahead of time, so if you are thinking of bringing a group for one of their terrific classes, I'd suggest booking early!


The first thing we did, after brainstorming things we might look for (scat, tracks, hair, broken twigs, disturbed soil, etc.) was focus on scat (i.e. poop) and think about how it might be different for different animals. I used the scat story provided in the museum booklet,  reading the story out loud and letting them try to guess what kind of animal left each item in the story. Incidentally, they loved being able to say "poop", though I insisted on the more scientific term.

After this, I moved on to the various tracks we might find in the area. A couple of good books are Wild Tracks! A Guide to Nature's Footprints by Jim Arnosky and Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints by Millicent E. Selsam. Wild Tracks! has some great fold-out pages with life-size tracks to look at.

I also happened to have a "tracks" poster and I used this to point out some of the main differences in the different kinds of animals and the tracks they leave behind. For example, you almost never see claw marks in the tracks of felines because they have retractable claws. Not so for dogs and other Canids. Their claws are usually easy to see. 

In addition to the books, there are some nice field guides out there. There is a Peterson Guide called Animal Tracks that I have found to be quite useful. For usability I always prefer the Peterson Guides to Audubon or Stokes. Maybe it's just a personal preference, but I find things easier to locate in these books and to have better pictures and more pertinent information. I also found another field guide called Animal Tracks of the Carolinas by Tamara Eder that looks very helpful. We haven't used these yet, but we may do so next week when we visit a local park called Yates Mill Pond. For $25 the folks at the park will give us another instructional class on animal tracks and signs as well as a guided walk to see if we can find anything out near the pond. 

A web search had yielded me this post, which had a couple of nice YouTube videos we were able to watch. There are some other resources here that might be useful as well. Here are the videos.They are only a couple of minutes long.
Finding tracks in the snow: 

Finding tracks in mud: 

I had the kids work on this little matching sheet and see how well they could do. 

After that we did the "Track Story" activity from the Museum booklet in groups. Each group was given one of four drawings depicting tracks and other signs and told to see if they could figure out together what had happened and tell the "story". This was a fun group activity that got them thinking and working together to try and use their powers of deduction. Most were not correct, but it was fun to do anyway. 

There are many other activities you can do, of course. We just don't really have the time in our group. One classic activity is to make plaster casts of tracks you find. You can find directions for that and a number of other activities at these sites.

http://www.bear-tracker.com/teachers.html
http://kindernature.storycounty.com/display.aspx?DocID=20054131154
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/education/classroomscience/animaltracks/teacher/default.cfm
http://www.concord.org/~btinker/guide/tracks/tracks_activities.html