This is part of my Fifteen Minute Focus Series. It’s a follow up to Farm Animal Science.

Supplies: Playdough, plastic animals with good realistic shaped feet to make footprints with, and a doll with good footprints. Colored pencils or markers. (optional: rubber stamp of a pawprint or horseshoe, and a stamp pad.) Tiny plastic animals or animal counters or animal stickers. (Those are Amazon affiliate links.) Worksheets. (See below.)

Prep: roll playdough out flat, “walk” animals across to leave trails of footprints.

Activity: Bring out playdough with footprints in it. Ask them to observe. What do they see? Help them notice where there are only two footprints (birds or humans) and where there are sets of four footprints. What can they guess about who left the footprints?

Show the plastic animals you used to make footprints. Talk about them: which are birds vs. mammals. How many legs do they have? Feathers or fur?

Hand out worksheets. You can use these in several ways, depending on the age and capabilities of the kids: they could draw pictures of the animals in each square, or draw pictures of the footprints, or write the first letter of each word or the whole word.

Then get tiny plastic animals or counters or stickers. Can they find one animal to match each square on their worksheet?

After this activivity, read a book, or sing a song. Recommended Books and Songs about the Farm.

Here is the free downloadable worksheet for this preschool science activity: