Animal Fact File with a Word Bank

A dashed word bank sits where the drawing box would be on this 2nd grade fact file, holding ten chips in two rows: mammal, fish, land, both, 8, 0, fur, no, 4, spines. Six of them are true of the forest creature at the top — on the printed sheet a hedgehog — and four are decoys drawn from the same fields. Below is the six-row file with its three-line writing rules, Animal group down to Can it fly?, every row blank. The child finds the true fact for each row in the bank and copies it in, then finishes the sentence starter, The hedgehog can, at the bottom.

Copying from a bank is the scaffold between circling and writing: the child still has to select — fish or mammal, fur or spines, 4 legs or 8 — but the spelling is supplied. The four decoys come from at least two different fields, so a child cannot finish by dropping the leftovers wherever a row is empty; each decoy belongs to the same row as a true chip and has to be ruled out there. It is a good page for a child who knows the animal but freezes at a blank line, and for a class where spelling is not the lesson.

One sheet, pencil, ten words to weigh. The base animal fact file page has the same six rows and no bank, so it is the natural next step; the circle-the-true-facts page is the one before, where the choices sit inside each row and nothing is written. The write-three-sentences page uses a completed file as its source instead.