Animal Fact File: Circle the True Facts

Every row of the fact file on this 2nd grade page is already filled — three times over. Beside Animal group the chips read mammal, bird, insect; beside Where it lives, air, land, water; beside What it eats, plants, meat, both; beside Legs, three numerals; beside Body covering, shell, spines, fur; and beside Can it fly?, no and yes. The child reads the three choices in each row and circles the one that is true for the forest creature pictured at the top, which on the printed sheet is a hedgehog. Then they draw its home in the dashed box and finish The hedgehog can.

Circling replaces writing here, and that changes who the page is for. A child who knows that a hedgehog has spines but cannot yet spell spines can still show it, and a child who has never met the animal can reason from the picture — it clearly has legs, it clearly has no wings. The wrong choices are true of other animals in the same theme, not nonsense, so the Body covering row really does ask the child to weigh shell against spines against fur. Across the page the correct chip sits in every position, so no column is the answer column.

It prints on one sheet. This is the recognition face of the animal-fact-file family and carries no writing standard — it is a science page about what an animal is, where it lives and how it is covered. Use it before the base page, where the same six rows are blank, or as the check afterwards; the word-bank page sits between the two, with the true facts printed but mixed among decoys.