Animal Fact File: Forest Creatures

One forest creature fills this 2nd grade animal fact file — on the printed sheet it is a hedgehog, its name in a banner beside the picture. To the right of the picture is a dashed box labelled Draw where it lives. Below runs the file itself: six rows with a heading on the left and three-line handwriting rules on the right — Animal group, Where it lives, What it eats, Legs, Body covering and Can it fly? The last band gives a sentence starter, The hedgehog can, with a rule to finish it. Every fact row is blank; the child finds out and writes.

This is a research page, not a comprehension page: nothing on the sheet tells the child what a hedgehog eats. The six headings are the questions, and the child answers them from a class book, a short film or the teacher's own reading aloud, one short fact per row. The headings are the same six fields for every animal in the family, which is what makes the file a template — a child who has done the hedgehog can do a fox or an owl with the same page. The drawing box asks for the habitat, not the animal, so the child has to decide what a hedgehog's home looks like.

Print one per child, or one per group with the animal chosen for them. This is the base page of the animal-fact-file family, and it owns the empty template; the word-bank page prints the six true facts in a bank to copy from, the circle-the-true-facts page turns each row into three choices, and the write-three-sentences page prints the file filled in and asks for sentences instead. Use this one when the class has a source to read.