Making Tracks with Footprint Mysteries KG 1st 2nd GATE Primary Challenges!

Engaging challenge of a highly participatory and creative nature for our youngest primary kids!

Here’s another lesson for our youngest gifted learners based on research and best practices advocated by the National Association of Gifted Children. It’s rich in age 4-7 critical thinking opportunities with hands-on learning, visual discrimination and details, improvisational opportunities including creativity, storytelling, writing and art, and engaging activities associated with the kids’ immediate world around them.

Even though some of our youngest kids are already readers, students are not required to be able to read in order to successfully navigate through these themed “tracks” activities. We use two read-aloud picture books (also optional) along with examples and ideas taken from the world around us to deliver content. This is not an independent study. It is a guided group series of activities and lessons.

Recommended Books (though not required): Tracks in the Snow by Wong Herbert Yee and Footprints in the Snow by Mei Matsuoka.

Materials: Common classroom supplies

Level: Pre-K(very challenging!), KG, 1st and 2nd grades

Launch and Animal Tracks: Critical thinking about Footprints in the Snow. Kids draw an elephant footprint and what could have been smashed inside. Bonus—What did you find underground? Kids draw a mystery item and give clues as their classmates try to figure out what was found underground.

Everyone Leaves Tracks: Just like Tracks in the Snow . . . In this activity, students remove a shoe, trace it, and then draw the details of the shoe’s treads inside the “footprint.” We are practicing visual discrimination, patterns, hand-eye coordination – pretty challenging stuff for these little guys!

Classroom Footprint Mystery: Prepare your room for the footprint mystery. In this portion of the unit, students use critical thinking, problem-solving, storytelling, and improvisation to solve a mystery you’ve conjured up using the shoeprints students have made in the previous activity.

Footprint Drawing: In between your live-action shoeprint mystery, let’s draw another little mystery of our own. We are going to make a smaller version of our own “footprints in the snow.”

Making Tracks Poem: Let’s address language and writing more specifically by constructing a class poem.