Author Fiesta-Jim Arnosky-Animal Tracks

It may not seem it, due to the lack of posts, but the Jim Arnosky Author Fiesta is still going strong around here.

One of the kids favorite books by Jim Arnosky has been Wild Tracks! This contains beautiful Arnosky animal illustrations along with life size illustrations of mostly North American animal tracks,tracks that can be found out and about right here in our neck of the woods.

After enjoying perusing this book for a few weeks, the time came to start some projects.

The first fun activity was to make plaster casts of our own "tracks". I used homemade playdough for the print and then

poured plaster of paris into the prints. I sent Becky on the mission of finding Plaster of Paris since this is NOT one of our normal craft materials. It was easily found in the craft section of Wal-Mart. Twenty-four hours later we had nice casts of some of the kids prints. Two came out perfect-one did not.

We then got out tracing paper to trace our favorite animal tracks out of the Wild Tracks book.
Gracie choose a moose. After tracing the print, she transferred it onto regular paper and then colored it in-concentrating on shading-just like Jim Arnosky does.
We then made tracks of Mark and Grace's feet. We did this in the bathroom, as they sat on the edge of the tub!
making our print
Grace and Mark's tracks.

Our wall display. (Yes, we are almost out of wall space at our home.)

Mark did not choose a North American mammal. He chose a African lion, because it is his favorite. Jim Arnosky included this in the book for size comparison to American cats.