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Literacy Centers: Maned Sloth

Help your students learn more about the maned sloth while practicing reading and writing skills with these free literacy centers for intermediate students.

Help your students learn about the maned sloth with these free and engaging literacy activities.

Work on reading, main ideas, research and vocabulary with this collection of resources.

This is another free resource for teachers and homeschool families from The Curriculum Corner.

Focus on the maned sloth

Let’s begin by learning a little about the maned sloth. While there might be a few variations your students come up with, I will share the order I had the sentences in during writing.

I have removed the off topic sentence in each of the paragraphs below.

What is your favorite animal? Mine is the maned sloth. Many people like them because they look cute and cuddly in pictures. I like them because I think they are interesting to learn about.

Lovers of maned sloths often say that they think they are cute animals. They are mostly brown with a long mane of black hair that is white underneath. Their hair is acually course and not soft and fluffy like some people think. The outside layer of their hair often has mites, beetles and other insects living in it. It doesn’t sound like a sloth is as cuddly as some people think!

Do you know where the maned sloth lives? Today the maned sloth can be found in the rainforest in southeaster Brazil. They like hot and humid climates that have rain year-round. Maned sloths live most of their lives in trees, they rarely come down to the ground.

Sloths are well-known for being lazy animals. They don’t move far in a day. In a day, they can move about 40 yards across the forest canopy. Also, they sleep a lot! Each day they will sleep 15 to 20 hours.

Humans need to work to help save the maned sloth. They are considered vulnerable on the endangered species list. One problem is that deforestation is taking away their homes. Also, some people hunt these animals for their meat.

I hope you have enjoyed learning about the maned sloth. I think that they are interesting animals to study. They definitely aren’t an animal I would want to cuddle with but they are fun to watch and learn about!

Help your students learn more about the maned sloth while practicing reading and writing skills with these free literacy centers for intermediate students.

Helping children explore through literacy centers

This collection of resources is designed to help children learned about the maned sloth while working on different skills in reading and writing.

The first graphic organizers provided can be used to provide practice with researching animals.

Children can complete an organizer that is similar to a KWL chart. You can also have your students share words and phrases that they would use in their writing about maned sloths – this can be for creative or informational text.

Finally, have students find interesting facts to share with their classmates.

Next, you will find pages of sentences teaching about maned sloths. When I used these pages for the child I am working with, I printed each page on a different color of card stock. This made for easy sorting.

Students will take all of the sentences that belong with a paragraph. Then, they will search for the main idea. Another task is to find the sentence that is off topic – they will remove this one. Finally, they will put the sentences in an order that makes sense.

When finished, they will have five paragraphs teaching about the maned sloth.

These cards can be used for reading fluency. Have students work on reading until they feel like their reading is fluent.

You will also find a photo of a maned sloth.

There are vocabulary matching cards. Students will match each word with the definition.

Next, students will work on parts of speech with the printable pages.

There is a blank, lined writing page with sloth clip art to use as you need.

You will also find two task cards you can place at a center for student directions.

You can download this literacy center set here:

Center Printables

As with all of our resources, The Curriculum Corner creates these for free classroom use. Our products may not be sold. You may print and copy for your personal classroom use. These are also great for home school families!

You may not modify and resell in any form. Please let us know if you have any questions.

You may not modify and resell in any form. Please let us know if you have any questions.