Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Owl Pellet Fun

As part of our owl unit I ordered owl pellets from a company in California that had barn owl pellets. I also ordered a little guide book that not only gave information on the owls but had skeletal pictures of many of the rodents and birds they ate.

The owl pellets are sterilized and come wrapped in foil. They say you can dissect them dry or moist. All I can add is that when these pellets are moist they are very stinky, so we did ours dry. We just used toothpicks to gently take the pellet apart.

The girls were amazed by the number of bones we found in each pellet. Several skulls were identified as mice and shrews.
We had a skeletal drawing of a mouse that the girls could look at to identify hip bones, leg bones, ribs, etc. Even my three year old enjoyed this activity. When we were finished my girls glued the bones to a piece of paper. For older children, or if you have more time you can try to reconstruct an entire rodent with the bones you find.
This fit into our discussion about food chains and owls perfectly. I'm so glad we did this!
We did this activity the night before leaving on our spring break trip so we didn't get to spend too much time on it. We will pick up more activities to do when we get back to school.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Owl Babies Activity

We are continuing on with our Owl unit study this week as we continue to watch Molly the Owl.

Yesterday we read Owl Babies:


It is a cute book about three owlets waiting for their Momma to return from hunting. We decided to make a counting book. We got the idea from here.


We had so much fun gathering twigs, stamping our thumbprints and putting the book together. My older girls enjoyed helping Little One during this preschool activity.


The first page of our book.






We went all the way up to five for our little book.


I wanted to show you some pictures from our last owl activity. Please note that I found mistakes on the definition page as I mentioned at the end of last post. Sorry about that!

Our chart on producers, consumers, and decomposers.
Our vocabulary flashcards.

Soph's life cycle: flower, Caterpillar, mole, and Molly.



Em's life cycle: tree, ladybug, possum, Molly, mushrooms. (hers is a circle of life)



Our owl pellets arrived so stay tuned for some dissecting fun!