Letter Recognition and Read Along Book Activity

Dr. Tony Hare’s Animal Fact File is a wonderful collection of animals. This almost 200 page, full color book provides details on various mammals. Well-known species like tigers and wolves are discusses as well as lesser-known species like Przhevalski’s horse and the serval.

Each animal featured receives a double spread illustrating the specific animal and highlighting certain unique characteristics. The skeleton is depicted for every entry as well, providing a useful tool to compare the different structures. The text is easy to ready and engaging for a range of ages. Each page has a lot of information, the reader can choose the level of detail to explore saving the leftover for next time.

We found the illustrations beautiful, they look like they could be in a biology textbook. The detail is exquisite, making the animals pop alive, life-like before our eyes. Young eyes will be captivated by the high attention to detail and variety of information.

Letter Recognition and Letter Practice (Early Learning Skills)

Things To Use:

• White erase board or paper
• Markers
• Alphabet flash cards

Grab your white erase board and start writing! My daughter picked an animal, we read about it and I wrote the name down on the white board. Once the letters were written it was much easier for her to copy them down as well. I gave simple directions to help her along – Line straight down, loop around, pull the tail down, etc…

Without guiding lines, our letters scrunched up quite a bit! Giving a top and bottom guide helped facilitate proper spacing.

Exhausted from the writing practice, we moved on to a more simple game of letter recognition with alphabet flash cards. Here we discussed the differences between upper and lower case letters. We made a “hunt” in the index, matching up animals with their page number and finding the right page. I asked my three-year-old to practice sounding out the letters as we found their match.

You can easily adapt this activity with any book you have already in your library. This Animal Fact File is a gem of a resource and recommend it to any family filled with animal lovers!

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