How To...Identify Fingerprints and Animal Tracks

Students love spy mysteries and the popularity of TV shows such as CSI and Unsolved Mysteries indicates the fascination is not only limited to our students. Why not capture this fascination in a bottle for your science classroom – an ink/paint bottle! Prints of all shapes and sizes make a great cross-curricular Earth Day theme.

Fingerprints and animal tracks, are both great motivators for learning more about life science.

Fingerprints
Start a class discussion on prints and you'll find that many of us frame our understanding of prints with our own hand and fingerprints. Recent current events made fingerprinting of voters in Iraq a memorable news picture.

• Create thumb people and fingerprint creatures. Include Ed Emberly's Fingerprint Drawing Book (Little, Brown, 2001) and Ed Emberly's Great Thumbprint Drawing Book (Little, Brown, 1994) in your resources.
• Investigate forensics using events like the recent tsunami and September 11 as a discussion for grades 4-8.
• Display copies of student birth certificates as part of a Self study. Compare the baby footprint to their footprint today. Sponsor a Kids Safe program to take photos and fingerprints as a community service project.
• Handprint art – create a "hands together" unity banner to display in the school hall for Earth Day.


• Study the unique "prints" on whale flukes.

Crime Investigations: Science Workshop for K-3 Teachers
www.unt.edu/scope/book.pdf
This is a 62-page teacher guide with experiments, lessons and student activity pages. The chapter on fingerprinting is very good.

FBI - Kids Page
www.fbi.gov/kids/k5th/kidsk5th.htm
With more than 250 million fingerprint records on file with the FBI (enough to create 133 stacks as tall as the Empire State Building!) it's no wonder that the FBI is starting to file their fingerprints electronically. Download the FingerPrint Card and create a fingerprint record for your class or the whole school.

Animal Tracks
Prints are not limited to people, so help students broaden their understanding of "fingerprinting" to include animals and plants. With the ground starting to soften, spring is the perfect time for finding tracks in the school yard, a nearby park or forest.

• Try footprint art outside and make a cast of your hand or footprint. This is a great introduction to fossils and how paleontologists use imprints to identify animals and plants.
• Make plaster casts of tracks you find or just snap a digital picture and try to identify each track. Print a "Wanted" sign to carry with you to investigate the prints found in the school yard.

http://www.bear-tracker.com/
This great field guide for identifying animal tracks, complete with pictures and drawings of tracks, has background information on each animal and their habitat, and tips for finding animal tracks. Download the three-page PDF guide to tracks which includes room for drawing in the tracks you find. Use the website pictures to identify tracks from mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and insects.

www.42explore.com/animaltracks.htm
This terrific site covers the basics of tracking with a plethora of rich links for the classroom. Don't miss the lesson plans with language arts integration ideas at Websites for Teachers, and lots of student pages to download.

Making Tree Prints
With Arbor Day in April, take printing one step further by doing bark prints in and around the school or home. Create crayon or chalk bark (or leaf) rubbings. Put them on a bulletin board by the computer and use the following websites to identify the trees by their leaves and bark.

www.arborday.org/trees/treeid.cfm
Tree ID animations with printed version of the online guides.

www.tlt.ab.ca/projects/Div1/Grade2/Sonia/Index.html
Use a digital camera in this primary science unit.

Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.