To not understand this homework! Please help!

[ThatEdgyHedgehog]

Please help, I am trying to help (or at least I was last night) with this apostrophe task. I thought I understood. It seems I do not.

In the forest, the wolves' howls’ echoed as the trees' branches’ swayed in the wind. Underground, in the foxes' home, they huddled together to get warm. In the trees’, the squirrel’s feet pattered as they scrambled up and down the branches’ looking for food.

Is that correct? Why does branches have an apostrophe? Howls'?

Eg
’My child dresses themself’ or
’My child tells me their age’
My grammar isn’t good enough to understand the subtleties and sorry to derail the thread.

But the advice re apostrophies is sound.

They is great for a single non specific employee. It’s not so good for a person whose gender is being obscured.
It genuinely mangles sense of the message. As in ‘they no longer do drum lessons’, suggesting the organisation has closed rather than my neighbour’s child having stopped taking lessons.
One could have begun a community awareness and fund raising campaign to reinstate the lessons, had one not suddenly twigged. 😬

Can a teacher answer this once and for all?!!

Agreed

Assuming there are several wolves, trees, foxes and squirrels. If any of these are singular then it changes

Wolves and foxes can't be singular. Squirrels can't be singular here either, because of 'they' further on in the sentence. Trees very unlikely to be singular in that sentence unless it's a forest with only one tree in it.

Wow, that answer booklet was very, very wrong, OP!

This

It becomes clear when you know, what the apostrophe is for. The job of the apostrophe is to denote possession. So for example - the wolves' howls. The howls belong to the wolves, so we use an apostrophe after the S because there are many wolves which is plural. If it was one wolf howling, the wolf is singular, so it would have an apostrophe before the S, as in wolf's howls.

No teacher required; the answer from @takealettermsjones - 3 minutes after it was first posted - was absolutely spot on.

It’s a rubbish task though. No one ever writes the trees’ branches.

In fairness, the task on the worksheet does say that they are plural possessive nouns, but we didn't have that information on the thread, which makes it less clear.