This Guessing Game is sure to keep kids occupied while learning and having fun. Try this out with play-dough or with items found around your kitchen along with other fun indoor kids activities!

When we walk outside in the winter, we often notice footprints crossing the snowy landscape of our yard. Some of the footprints belong to the family of squirrels that lives in the enormous maple tree in front of our house, and others belong to raccoons or rabbits. Once in a while there are very peculiar footprints, and we wonder what animal came into our yard. It is a lot of fun, and I thought to replicate the game of guessing animal footprints for my son indoors

All we needed was a big batch of play-dough and some plastic animal figurines. Little animal figurines are some of our favourite toys: they participate in various sensory bins and they live in dollhouses, they take baths with my son and they explore the garden during the summer months. They are also great with play-dough! Making impressions of their bodies has always been an interesting activity, and we recently noticed that their feet are carefully crafted to create realistic footprints.

So, we decided to make a winter forest scene and fill it with animal footprints. We rolled play-dough to imitate the snowy ground, and a couple of fallen branches from outside became trees in our landscape. A sheet of blue cardstock formed a frozen lake. Then we chose a few North America animals – the kind that we could find inhabiting a neighbouring forest, if not our yard. There was a deer and a raccoon, a fox and a rabbit, a bear and a beaver.

First, we had a careful look at how the footprints of each animal looked. Then we left tracks across the whole surface of the play-dough and tried to identify which animals had made them. Our deer was the only animal with hooves, so its footprints were the easiest to identify here. The bear cub, rabbit and fox all had oval-shaped footprints, but their sizes differed. The beaver and raccoon left hand-shaped tracks, which was a fact I was unaware of before playing this game! We felt quite like explorers, tracking all of our toy animals down.

To make this game more suitable for older children, one of the players can look away, while someone else makes footprints with different animals. Then the first player will try to match animals with their tracks. If you want to complicate things even more, take more animals and do not study their footprints first!

When we walk outside in the winter, we often notice footprints crossing the snowy landscape of our yard. Some of the footprints belong to the family of squirrels that lives in the enormous maple tree in front of our house, and others belong to raccoons or rabbits. Once in a while there are very peculiar footprints, and we wonder what animal came into our yard. It is a lot of fun, and I thought to replicate the game of guessing animal footprints for my son indoors

All we needed was a big batch of play-dough and some plastic animal figurines. Little animal figurines are some of our favourite toys: they participate in various sensory bins and they live in dollhouses, they take baths with my son and they explore the garden during the summer months. They are also great with play-dough! Making impressions of their bodies has always been an interesting activity, and we recently noticed that their feet are carefully crafted to create realistic footprints.

So, we decided to make a winter forest scene and fill it with animal footprints. We rolled play-dough to imitate the snowy ground, and a couple of fallen branches from outside became trees in our landscape. A sheet of blue cardstock formed a frozen lake. Then we chose a few North America animals – the kind that we could find inhabiting a neighbouring forest, if not our yard. There was a deer and a raccoon, a fox and a rabbit, a bear and a beaver.

First, we had a careful look at how the footprints of each animal looked. Then we left tracks across the whole surface of the play-dough and tried to identify which animals had made them. Our deer was the only animal with hooves, so its footprints were the easiest to identify here. The bear cub, rabbit and fox all had oval-shaped footprints, but their sizes differed. The beaver and raccoon left hand-shaped tracks, which was a fact I was unaware of before playing this game! We felt quite like explorers, tracking all of our toy animals down.

To make this game more suitable for older children, one of the players can look away, while someone else makes footprints with different animals. Then the first player will try to match animals with their tracks. If you want to complicate things even more, take more animals and do not study their footprints first!

After we were done identifying footprints, my son had still more fun, making his animals play hide-and-seek among the branches.