New York Zoo have a brilliant activity on their website called ‘Build Your Wild Self’.  A super-fun and interactive way for children to create a wild creature made up of lots of parts of real animals.

This would be a great starting point for information text writing or for creating a fact file.  If you use Talk 4 Writing approaches this would work well at the third stage of invention or as a wacky way of introducing the features of information texts before you apply them to a real animal.

The finished animal is given a very technical name based on all its parts and the final picture can be printed off or emailed.  These images could even be turned into trading cards or top trumps by using various free websites or apps.

http://www.buildyourwildself.com/