Animal Fact File: Write Three Sentences

The fact file on this 2nd grade page comes already filled in. Beside the picture of the forest creature — a hedgehog on the printed sheet — a compact six-row table reads mammal, land, both, 4, spines, no against its headings. Beneath, a lined panel headed Write three sentences about the animal offers three starters, each on its own two-line handwriting rule: The hedgehog is, The hedgehog has, The hedgehog eats. A fourth pair of rules at the bottom has no starter at all. The child reads the file, turns three of its facts into three sentences, and adds one more fact of their own on the last lines.

The move here is from fact to sentence. Is, has and eats point at three different rows — group or covering, legs or spines, food — and the child has to choose which fact fits which verb, then write it out as a complete sentence with a capital and a full stop. The open fourth line is where a child who knows something the file does not say — it curls into a ball, it sleeps all winter — gets to write it. There is no drawing box on this page; the space goes to the writing rules, which are two lines each so a real 2nd grade sentence can wrap.

Print one per child. This is the composing page of the animal-fact-file family and the only one that supplies the facts in full, which makes it the right page for a writing lesson rather than a research one. The base page reverses it — six blank rows and a source to read — and the compare-two-animals page puts two printed files side by side.