This is part of my Fifteen Minute Focus Series. It’s a follow up to Farm Animal Science. We use playdough and plastic animals to learn about footprints, and do some drawing or writing as well.

Objective: children will be able to describe some ways that bird footprints and animal footprints may differ from each other.

Supplies:

• playdough (here’s my recipe), rolling pins (optional)
• plastic animals with good realistic shaped feet to make footprints with, and a doll with good footprints
• Optional: colored pencils or markers. (Or: rubber stamp of a pawprint or horseshoe, and a stamp pad.)
• Optional: Tiny plastic animals or animal counters or animal stickers. (Those are Amazon affiliate links.)
• Worksheets. (See below.)

Prep: roll some playdough out flat, “walk” a doll, one or more birds, and one or more mammals across it to leave trails of footprints.

Activity

Introduction

Say “I went to the farm the other day, and when I looked at the mud in the barnyard, I noticed something…” 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 toys you used to make the footprints. Talk about them: which are birds vs. mammals. How many legs do they have? (Point out the confusing detail that although humans have four limbs, we walk on two feet. But we are really more like mammals than birds.) Have them notice whether each creature would have feathers or fur?

Playdough Exploration

Hand out a ball of playdough to each. Show them how to flatten it with their hand, flip it over, flatten again and so on, till it’s a big flat smooth surface.

Then pass around the plastic animals. Let them play for a good while with making footprints. Show them how when their surface is filled up with footprints, they can roll the dough back into a ball, flatten it again and start over.

Worksheets

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. I let them all choose which one to do, and they made different choices.

Or: you could pass out tiny plastic animals or counters or stickers. Can they find one animal to match each square on their worksheet?

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

Optional Extension

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