All about owls.....

After the success of our hedgehog unit it was Sweet Pea's chance to choose a topic.. and her latest obsession?
Owls.. anything owly will count.... and luckily there is no shortage of that!!

It started innocently enough with a request from Sweet Pea asking if we could see owlets.. which led us to this fantastic live feed of a Great Horned Owl nest....  we were able to watch a pair of owls, lay eggs and incubate them.  We watched two owlets hatch, get fed, grow and fly away... it was just fantastic!  Even now that they are gone, we have found a Barred Owl to watch... the three eggs are being incubated..right now!

Next step was to find a great read aloud book about owls... Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat was a perfect fit.  The kidlets both enjoyed the laugh out loud funny adventures of a couple of pet owls and thought it was great that it is based in Canada.

I had a harder time finding a good lapbook to go with this unit but was able to put one together from multiple sources and use what we wanted from each...  There were a couple that we wanted to add, so we made our own from the homeschoolshare website templates.

 Owl Babies Lapbook

Nocturnal Animals Lapbook

 

Owl Lapbook - with owl pellet dissection booklet

We watched a PBS documentary Owl Power and
some related Wild Kratts episodes (Desert Elves and Snowy Owl Invasion).

A friend of mine showed us some great owl rocks we could make!  So we made a trip down to the river where we searched for the perfect sized and shaped rocks, washed them off and got out our sharpies....

Sweet Pea drew some great owls...

Goober, on the other hand, made some hedgehog rocks!  

I took out a variety of non fiction books about owls to help us complete our lapbooks...
and left them around the house to look at!

Owl: A year in the life of North American Owls 

Owls

We have had a great owl pellet dissection app for awhile now.. the kidlets love it... they have to find an owl, gather the pellets, take them apart and identify the prey and how it fits into a food chain.  It is well worth the cost of the app..

 But of course I need the real thing sometimes!
I found a place in Calgary that sells owl pellets..........  and made an order.....

They were fantastic.... the kidlets used their booklet from the lapbook to record their observations through the dissection and the bone identification chart that came with the kit was awesome!

They both found multiple skulls in their pellets and were able to identify them on their own!

Here are the finished lapbooks...  Sweet Pea opted for an owl drawing on the front of hers...

Goober found a picture in an old magazine to cut out...

And finally to finish up our Owl unit we did some yoga to an owlet story... I just recently discovered Cosmic Kids Yoga and we are loving it!! 

This was a fantastic unit... so much fun and I'm sure we could have spent a lot more time on owls!! 

Which happened when Sweet Pea decided on an owl theme for her birthday.. check out these great snacks, cupcakes and craft!