Compare Two Animals: Same and Different

Two forest creatures share this 2nd grade page, each in its own card with a picture, a name banner and a printed four-row file: Animal group, Where it lives, What it eats, Body covering. On the sheet shown they are a ladybug and an eagle — insect and bird, both listed in the air, both eating meat, shell against feathers. Beneath the cards sit four small rows, one per fact, each with a same chip and a different chip to circle. The bottom panel has four handwriting rules with starters: Same, Same, Different, Different. The child reads both files, circles four times, then writes two likenesses and two differences as sentences.

The pair is chosen so that exactly two of the four facts agree, which is what makes the writing panel work — there are always two sames and two differents to find, never three of one. A child who circles by looking at the pictures will get the covering right and the food wrong; the files have to be read. The legs and can-it-fly rows from the base file are dropped here because they are trivial to compare, leaving the four facts that ask for a real look.

One sheet, no drawing. This face fans out by theme rather than by animal — the two animals come from the wave's theme and the page never names them in its title, since a title would give the comparison away. It is the family's only two-animal page; the write-three-sentences page is the one-animal composing step before it, and the who-am-I page uses the same fact fields as clues.