We took advantage of the ongoing winter and snow-covered ground by exploring tracking during the last few weeks.  We read several tracking stories that gave children practice in looking at tracks and inferring the story told by the tracks.  Two of these books were Whose Tracks Are These?  A Clue Book of Familiar Forest Animals, by James Nail and Hyla Skudder and Who's Been Here?:  A Tale in Tracks, by Fran Hodgkins.  Both of these books encourage children to use tracks in context as well as other clues to interpret what happened.  Last week during ECO when we first arrived in the field we discovered numerous tracks.  Children were eager to explore so we spent the first part of our session following trails and thinking about the story that each one told.  We also saw many tracks as we headed into the woods.

This week during our ECO session at school we split into groups and used craft sticks to set our own trails leading to a stuffed animal at the end.  Before we set our trails we discussed the trickiness of real animal tracks:  animals don't necessarily follow a direct route and the tracks aren't always obvious. In the end I think the consensus was that our own trails were a bit easier to follow.  We also completed our own tracking backgrounds and shared shadow puppet shows that told a short story for each of our nature names.  And now we are looking forward to spring like weather next week!