We try to go for walks daily. Sometimes those walks turn into school.
Earlier in the week we noticed a lot of deer tracks in the mud, and a little further down the trail, we found raccoon prints.
Pilot Guy was home and he explained to the boys how the tracks could reveal a lot about an animal. Which way it is going, size, etc. The boybarians loved it and soon the idea was hatched to make casting of the tracks. It would just so happen when a neighbor was selling her house and cleaning her garage she donated a big pail of Plaster of Paris to our "school."
The boybarians looked up raccoons and their paws on the internet. They think we have a back paw print and then set of front paws. They also have a couple of really nice deer tracks.
They dusted and cleaned their castings this morning. I heard them joking they were training to be palaeontologists. Overall, we all were super impressed with how good their castings turned out.
To further our nature study, after googling different tracks, we came across this great PDF of different animal tracks for Texas. It is a quick-print handy guide and also has an attached quiz. Lots of fun!
On a side note, this is the area that suffered from the wildfire in September. The trees are still blackened and all the underbrush is gone. The grass is returning. You can still see dirt piles where the firefighters cut fire lines.
1 comment:
Fantastic! My girls love making casts of animal tracks.
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