Owls

Wowza! It’s been a wild and crazy week and it’s only Wednesday!  I have been so incredibly busy with school, home, and classes.  My daughter danced with the Moscow Ballet last week in a performance of The Nutcracker, I had my final project due for my grad class, AND I had to get my topic proposal in so that I can graduate in May!  PLUS – both girls have dance recitals this weekend! Do I even have my Christmas tree up? Nope.  Soon…this weekend.  Yes, it WILL happen!!

Last week, we had so much fun studying owls!  Because of the shortened week from Thanksgiving, it meant that we had 2 extra days of centers to make up – plus one day that school was delayed because of a storm.  So…it worked out perfectly not to start “Christmas” until this week. 

Deanna has an amazing unit on Owls at Teacher’s Pay Teachers.  The children loved putting the All About book together!

Here are some snapshots of what we did:

We started off the week reading Owls by Christine Butterworth.  The children were immediately fascinated!

We created a brace map to show the parts of the owl.  The labels are on velcro and when we talked about each part the children showed that part with their bodies and one child attached the label.

 

 

The children then practiced labeling the parts of an owl independently.  My daughter let me borrow her Webkinz owl for the week.  My practicum student made the velcro versio so the children could explore with it at the science center.

On Tuesday we read:

This is a great book for teaching about mental images.  The children created a page for their Reader’s Workshop Journals about their mental images when they listened to the story. (forgot the picture!)

On Wednesday we read:

We discussed the characteristics of fiction and non-fiction and why this book is a fiction book.  After we read this book, we created a page in our owl about owl books about owls being nocturnal – in the story they go to sleep at night. 

On Thursday we read:

Again, we discussed fiction and non-fiction books, but we also discovered that even though a book is fiction, it can sometimes tell us true facts.  In this case, the owl eats a rat – this led to us completing the page about owls what owls eat.

We created a title page for our all about books.

On Friday we wrapped up our unit and read this book:

Before we read, we brainstormed words that might be in this book.  I was so pleased with the words that they came up with!

We also created this tree map about owls. 

I forgot to take a picture of the work mats for this activity – but you can find them in Deanna’s packet.  I modified it so we made number combination up to 6.  The kids really enjoy doing this, and I really think they are starting to get a sense of number and addition doing these whole group.

The next pictures are photos from our math problem solving that we did with owls.  I am SO exciting that the children are really starting to think about math and numbers on a higher level.  We always do the problem whole group with leading questions to guide the children towards the answer.The children complete it independently when they go back to their tables.  I love to see the thinking that some of them do – some were even wondering about multiplication! holy moly!

One of the most incredible, amazing experiences of my teaching career happened during the owl unit.  I had a parent volunteer in my room, and I had mentioned to her when I was reading that I would have LOVED to let the children explore with owl pellets, but they were just too expensive.  Later, when she came back to eat lunch with her daughter, she told me that she ordered a set of owl pellets for the class! I couldn’t believe it! It was such a kind, selfless act, and it just made my day! I can’t wait until they get here to explore even more!!

Spiders!

We had a great time this week reading and learning about spiders.  It was a great introduction to fiction and non-fiction books.  We began the week reading Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider.  The children loved the repetitiveness of this book, and soon chimed in right along with me.   I made sequencing cards with DJ Inkers clip art for the children to wear when we re-read the story on Tuesday.  We were supposed to make a list of all our characters in our reader's workshop notebooks, but that never happened! Time got away from us!  I also forgot to snap a picture of the children with the re-telling cards! I'll do that this week! 

 

Here are a couple of spider activities that we did in our math centers that I posted earlier.

 This is the Jill Egglton poem that we read throughout the week.  On Friday, we highlighted all of the S's and illustrated the poem.  I was so proud of this little guy! It was the best drawing of  a person that he has ever done! He copied mine, but it's a start, right??!

 We also played a fun game called "Spill the Spiders."  This is another one of Kim Adsit's fabulous ideas!  Put a select number of items in a container.  Sit in a circle and pass around the container until you stop the music.  When the music stops, the child will dump out the spiders and count them back into the container.  This is great for one-to-one correlation as well as counting skills.  I've done this a few times with other seasonal things, the kids LOVE it! I keep adding a few each time so it gets progressively harder.  You could also have them count backwards when taking the spiders out (just tell them how many there are to start!)

My mom was cleaning out her Halloween decorations just in time to give me this great spider web! We brainstormed words that start with /s/ and added them to our spider web.  I also had a GIGANTIC spider web that I hung from the ceiling! I wish I would have taken a picture of it before I took it down to hang up our spider glyphs!

We also read many non-fiction books about spiders.  We made a chart like this one from Deanna Jump's Blog.

 I used 2 experiments from Deanna's Simple Science packet - the children LOVED them!

 First, we did an experiment to learn how spiders kill and eat their prey.

Then we did an experiment to understand why spiders don't stick to their webs!  You can find the directions for the experiment as well as the response sheets at TPT .

I had planned to read this book as part of our preparation for our spider glyphs, but when I went to get it out on Friday - it wasn't in my lesson plan drawers.  Hmmmm.... I think my wonderful 3 1/2 year old swiped it out of my school bag and it never got to school! Oh well.. I had a back-up plan.

 

We read this version instead - the children LOVED it!

Earlier in the week we read this book:

 

Using these two books, we created a fun spider glyph! (Although my hand still hurts from cutting out those little spider legs!)

 We then analyzed our data from our glyphs.  This glyph as well as a great emergent reader (and many other spider activities that I didn't have time for) can be found in Deanna's Spiders packet on  Teachers Pay Teachers.

We also did a sorting activity on the whiteboard that came from Mailbox Magazine.

 

At the end of the week, we made a venn diagram comparing and contrasting elements of fiction and non-fiction books.  These are also on Kim's Reading Comprehension packet.  I forgot to snap a picture, so here is the picture from Kim Adsit's website 

Up next...oceans!