Who Am I? Mystery Animal

A dashed picture bank runs across the top of this 2nd grade page with six small forest creatures, each named under its picture — on the printed sheet a bear, a lizard, an ant, a bat, a wolf and an eagle. Under it are three tall riddle cards. Each begins Who am I? and gives five clues in the first person: I live on land. I eat plants and meat. I have fur. I cannot fly. I can swim. To the right of the clues is a Name line, and beyond it a dashed box to draw the answer. The child reads the five clues, finds the one animal in the bank they all fit, writes its name and draws it.

Each card's five clues rule out every other animal in the bank, and the bank holds three extra animals that are not the answer to any card, so the last riddle cannot be solved by elimination alone. The clues are the fact-file fields turned into sentences — group, home, food, covering, legs, flying, swimming — which is why a child who has done the base fact file recognises the shape at once. Reading for the one detail that separates the bear from the wolf, I eat plants and meat, is the informational-reading skill the page is built on.

It prints on one sheet; the drawing boxes are small, so a pencil sketch is enough. This is the reading face of the animal-fact-file family and the only one that starts from text rather than from a picture. The six-animal bank is drawn from the wave's forest theme, and the page never names the answers in its title. Use it after the fact files have been written, when the fields are familiar.