Owl Week

Wanna see something gross?  Yes, please!

I love focusing on owls during the month of October.  We have a full week of everything owls - we read the mentor text Owl Moon, do a paired owl passage, and then complete Owl Pellets.  This year my class was fortunate to have Donors Choose donors fund this project for us.  We were given a class set of pellets, forceps, owl posters, gloves, and a nonfiction owl book as part of our project.  

Once again it was a hit. The kids got down and dirty, and some wonderful parents were there to help the kids.  Some parents spritzed the pellets with spray bottles, some parents offered encouragement.  I always do this project outside - 2 huge pieces of butcher paper create a "table" for the kids.  Each partner group has a styrofoam plate (because of all the water that is used to break up the pellet a paper plate just won't do).  Each student also received a little bathroom cup to collect their bones and a pair of those blue forceps.  I used to use metal tweezers, but these blue ones do not get lost as easily.  I switched this year to the little bathroom cups since with big bowls they never clean the gunk off as well.  When done, they dump their little batch of bones into a snack size ziplock bag and then head inside to sort and label their bones using the information sheet from Ideas by Jivey... Who am I kidding?  I use a lot from Ideas by Jivey during this owl week of learning!  

        

Hope this helped!