We are gearing up for a fun unit about Woodland animals and I wanted to create a hands-on way for my tot and kindergartner to learn about animal tracks. I decided to use a white clay recipe from The Imagination Tree to create homemade clay animal tracks.
I wanted to make the clay without helpers since it involved the stove. This recipe only calls for baking soda, cornstarch and water so it was very easy to throw together. I was able to cook this clay and create the homemade animal tracks without Lil’ Red even knowing what I was doing. So this was a very quick to set-up.
I rolled the dough out on a plastic tray after being sprinkled with cornstarch. I wanted to have one clay disk per animal so I found a few different circle containers to use as a cookie cutter since my metal circle was too big. I used a Tupperware snack cup at first but wouldn’t have gotten all 12 toob animal tracks made! I re-rolled the clay and used a smaller icing cup from a tube of biscuits. This worked perfectly to get all 12 homemade animal track caly disks made.
I had to carefully move them to another plastic surface to dry. I used a Pampered Chef stone cleaner to slide underneath the clay disks. I also wanted to know which animal went with which disk. I placed each animal back onto it’s corresponding animal track clay disk and took a picture. Good thing I did cause some tracks had changed slightly during moving them. I also have a guide until they are dry and I can label the backs just in case they are harder then expected to match up.
Make sure you check out more North American Animal play on Rainy Day Mum. We wrote a guest post about our Woodland Nature Hike for her Storybook Woodland Animals Week!
