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Kids in the primary grades can learn basic research skills through a fun writing project that introduces them to nonfiction writing. These easy animal reports give children the structure they need to produce a report they’re proud of and excited to share with others!
How to Introduce Animal Report Writing
It’s good practice to help kids understand the kind of writing you’re going to do before diving in. To introduce animal reports, give the definition of an animal report. Explain how it’s non-fiction writing or full of true facts vs. a made-up fiction story or other type of writing.
Use non-fiction animal books as a model
If your child doesn’t have a good understanding of the characteristics of a non-fiction book, use an animal book as a model. Point out the different text features, like table of contents, illustrations with labels, glossary, and index, and talk about how those are helpful to the reader. Emphasize key things that you want to make sure your child includes in her animal report.
Write your own animal report as a model
Another way to introduce animal reports is to write one yourself and use it as a model. This will build up excitement for the writing process. Go through the steps for writing a report so you can anticipate any complications that might arise for your child. By sharing your animal report your child will know exactly what is expected.
Write an animal report together
After you’ve explained what an animal report is, write one together with your child. By writing a report together, you can set your child up for independent success.
My son and I recently wrote an animal report on whales. We used Whales by Gail Gibbons to gather information. We divided up the work, each of us taking a few pages to complete. Sometimes we collaborated on pages by drawing and coloring together.
Gail Gibbons has written many terrific non-fiction books about animals that I highly recommend for using as source texts. Her illustrations are big and colorful and not too complicated. Kids, and adults, can feel confident drawing animals for their reports when using her books as a guide.
Here’s a sampling of other books by Gail Gibbons to use for easy animal reports.
Steps for Easy Animal Report Writing
Choose animal
Choose an animal that interests you. There are so many mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and other critters in the world that are fascinating to learn about that it may be difficult to narrow it down. If that’s the case, choose an animal that you can find information about in a quality children’s book.
Decide what to include
Before you delve into the process of researching and writing, decide what to include in the animal report. You can decide this together by asking your child some leading questions:
- What kinds of things do you want to know about __________?
- In a book about __________ what do you think would be important to include?
An alternative is to come up with a list of topics beforehand. Read them to your child and ask her to be on the lookout for those topics during your research. In the animal report on whales, I gave my son these topics:
- Habitat: where it lives
- Appearance: what it looks like, special body features
- Diet: what it eats
- Predators: what animals does it have to watch out for
- Life cycle: how does it start and how does it grow and change
- Interesting facts: at least two things that people might not know about the animal
Read books
After choosing an animal, read books about your animal. The internet is a resource, but for this project, stick to books.
Find at least one well-written text that is devoted to your animal. (Animal encyclopedias won’t give enough information or illustrations to make animal report writing easy.) Try to find a book that matches your child’s reading level. If that’s not possible, read the book to your child. The point of this activity is writing, so don’t burden your child with difficult reading.
Take notes
The next step in writing easy animal reports is to take notes. Come up with a simple system to keep track of the information you learn as you read. Since I was writing this report with my son, I helped him with this step a lot. As we read a page in the book I asked him direct questions. If I noticed it talked about what whales eat I asked, “Did you hear anything on this page that tells us about a whale’s diet?”
Show your child how to jot down words or phrases. Explain that notes are not complete sentences. That would take too long and not be helpful! Notes are meant to be a visual reminder of what you learned. Looking at a few key words will help you know what to include in your animal report later.
Taking notes may take several days, depending on the length of your book and your child’s attention span.
Write draft
After taking notes, write a draft. Order is not important at this stage. Start by making the cover or work on one of the information pages.
Use your notes to help you know what to include. My son looked at the notes about diet and saw the words krill, fish, and plankton. I explained that he didn’t have to include everything, so he wrote about krill and fish. But in his illustration he included all three.
If we were doing a final copy, I’d point out that our illustrations should match our words. So if he added plankton to the pictures, he should add it to his sentence.
During the draft writing phase of the project, talk about illustrating as much as you do writing. The illustrations play a vital role in helping convey information. And for younger writers, they often feel more successful and less intimidated with illustrating. For example, my son and I talked about techniques, such as outlining with marker and then coloring in with colored pencil, like in the whale illustration above.
Make a table of contents
After the draft is written, decide the order of the pages and make a table of contents. You can print one out ahead of time if you chose the content of the report. Fill in the correct page numbers.
List sources
List the books you read to learn about your animal. This helps kids understand that we give credit to the people who provided the information about the animal. You can introduce the word bibliography.
Assemble report
This last step in the process is the most rewarding. Put all the pages of the animal report in order and staple. Use your table of contents as a guide.
Make final copy (optional)
Making a final copy is optional. It’s good to let your child experience writing a final draft, but it’s not necessary for every piece of writing. If you want to teach the writing process, then this is a good opportunity to do that. If your child wrote a few animal reports, then have him choose the one he’d like to make into a final draft or “published book.”
Go through the animal report with your child and talk what would make it a final copy. Here are some ideas:
- Does my writing make sense?
- Do my sentences begin with upper case letters?
- Did I use lower case letters?
- Do my sentences end with periods or question marks?
- Did I give enough information on the page?
- Are my drawings neat?
- Did I use enough bold colors?
- Have I used labels where it makes sense?
- Did I leave anything out?
- Am I proud of my work?
- What can I improve?
Ways to Differentiate Animal Report Writing
Not all children learn the same way or develop at the same rate, so you’ll need to tailor your animal report writing to your child. There are several ways to differentiate. If your child can write confidently, she’ll need less “hand-holding” from you.
When my daughter was in first grade her report writing looked very different than my son’s. She took notes about her animal on index cards and used paper that had only a box for illustrations and blank lines below. She wrote two-three complete sentences on each page.
My son needs more support, so I gave him sentence structures. He wasn’t expected to write complete sentences on his own. Filling in the blanks was more appropriate for his level and prevented him from getting too frustrated or overwhelmed.
If you’d like to use these animal report writing templates, you can find them here.
Ways to Differentiate Animal Report Writing
| For more challenge/independent writer | For more support/emergent writer |
| Read book independently Read more than one text Choose own topics for report pages Use index cards for note taking Use blank paper Add a glossary Add an index Teach basic bibliography format: (author last name, first name. date. title) Make a final copy that is typed | Read book to child Use only one text Select topics ahead Limit the topics to just a few Use chart for note taking Parent does note taking for child Use writing paper templates Fill-in-the blank sentence structures Don’t require a final copy |
Animal report writing provides meaningful writing experiences for kids. My daughter remembers her animal reports. Writing reports was one of her favorite writing activities when she was younger. By using a topic kids love and going through the right steps, teaching basic research, note taking, and report writing skills is easy.
