We recently watched a few Wolf documentaries and the kids really enjoyed them. There is one, a BBC documentary called The Snow Wolf – which traces a Mum Wolf after she loses her mate and she then moves through the Alps looking for a new territory for her young pups. My kids were routing for this mum wolf and her pups and learnt a lot by watching her. And I must admit it was such a nice change from our normal Big Cats / Snakes / Sharks animal themes that the kids are normally obsessed with that I could not resist extending it a bit.
We read up more about Wolves using this book The Story of the Wolf: Band 17/Diamond (Collins Big Cat)
The book is a lovely resource for a Wolf Topic. It covers the Canid Family, the different species of Wolf and how the wolf is built to survive in difficult terrain (my son found it fascinating that the wolf has 4 toes in his hind feet and 5 toes on his fore feet).
It also includes sections on the wolf pack, their pups, wolf communication, hunting, diet, how they evolved, wolf sanctuaries, people who are working to help wolves and rewilding projects – including the Yellowstone Park Project.
The fact sections are good and informative but I must admit the sections about how the wolves evolved and rewilding is what really interested the kids. They liked the section were it spoke about wolves starting to get closer to human settlements, possible becoming hunting companions and then pets. This is something they have picked up from a number of the historical fiction books that they have been reading so it was nice to see it included here and to read about the cave where there is evidence of a young boy travelling with a wolf (Wow).
Also the rewilding. We have watched the clip about the wolves in Yellowstone park and we have chatted about it and the possibility of them introducing wolves into Scotland so again we liked that they covered the rewilding in this little book and gave us some extra information about the Yellowstone project.
We decided it would be good to create our own Wolf Books filled with the facts that we have been learning so I printed out some Wolf Masks from the Activity Village website and we used those as our book covers. Then we traced around the masks and cut out lined paper in the same shape for the inside pages. I decided that it would be better to attach the pages together with some string so that the kids could add extra pages at a later date if they wanted to.
The booklet looks super cute.
The idea was the kids could fill their booklet with any facts that they had learnt and in any way that they wanted. (I am always interested to see how the tackle the same projects in their own way).
The wolf booklets were so easy to make – really just printing, tracing and cutting and both kids ended up writing quite a few pages – which is always something that I am keen to encourage so I think we might try this idea again. I already had a look on the Activity Village website and they have a number of different animal masks which we could use for future animal booklets.
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ofamily learning together 
That is a super cute booklet!
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ooh they are such a hit – I can’t believe I never thought of using masks as a template before.
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