Read page 3 together first: point to each pictured word, wolf, pack, howl and smell, and say it. These four are set in bold the first time they appear. When your child meets one of them, point back to its picture on page 3. Every other word can be sounded out letter by letter or is a common sight word such as the, is, see and come; help your child sound words out rather than guess from the picture. The age band is a guide, not a promise that every child is ready. Pages 22 and 23 give adults the facts and sources behind each page. For a book to read together, try Fold 2, Hello, Wolf!
The facts behind the pages
A grown gray wolf weighs about as much as a large dog: males typically 70 to 145 pounds, females 60 to 100 pounds, with northern wolves the largest.
Gray wolves can sprint at about 35 to 38 miles per hour, but their real strength is a steady trot they can keep up for hours.
A typical wild gray wolf pack is a family: a breeding pair, the mother and father, and their offspring from this year and earlier years.
The parents lead the pack by guiding its travel and hunts. Biologists now say calling them 'alphas' is misleading; they are simply the mother and father.
The wolf that has the pups is the mother. Before the birth she picks or digs a den, often in a hillside, under tree roots or among boulders, and the pups are born inside it.
Newborn wolf pups are blind and deaf, with their eyes sealed shut. Their eyes open at about 11 to 15 days old.
The whole family helps raise the pups. Adults carry meat home in their stomachs and bring it back up when the pups lick their mouths; any pack member may do this, not just the parents. Older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and the father also hunt, babysit and play with the pups.
Pack life and play
When pack members are apart, they howl to find one another. A low, long howl can carry up to 10 miles over open land, and each wolf has its own voice.
The howl lets separated pack members locate each other and regroup; packmates can tell who is calling.
Depending on the wind, a wolf can smell other animals, its own packmates among them, from more than a mile away.
A pack's home range can be huge: about 25 to 150 square miles in the Great Lakes states, and 300 to over 1,000 square miles in Alaska and northern Canada, where prey is sparse. The pack travels and patrols it.
A wolf's tail shows how it feels: held high when confident, hanging loose when relaxed, tucked when afraid. Wolves wag their tails when calm or playful.
Pups wrestle, chase, stalk and pounce on each other, and tug on sticks and bones the adults bring back.
These games build the strength and skills pups need to hunt. By autumn they are big and strong enough to join the adults on hunts.
A first book to read alone: a few short words on each page, repeated patterns, and the few hard words taught with pictures before the story starts.
- Ages
- 4–6
- Trim
- 6 × 9 in
- Pages
- 24
- Words
- 108
- Reading grade
- -2.3
See the printed pages
