'Owl' about owls

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon the kids became enchanted by owls. We were at the library for a presentation by a local raptor rescue center, and really what the kids wanted to see were the hawks. When the presenter revealed two owls I thought the kiddos might be disappointed.

It wasn't so. Turns out they were entranced by the stories of these owls: One was blind and had wing damage from being hit by a car, and the other had opened its eyes to humans and was therefore "imprinted" to think it was a human. It never learned to hunt or behave like an owl. On the way home from the library, MM asked me, "Mommy, do you know what I want to study?" And I thought, Yeah, princesses, of course. Nope. It was owls. I couldn't get back to the library quick enough to clean out its selection of owls books.

Over a week, here are some of the owl-related things we did:

• Read about the lives of owls, especially the snowy owl and the barn owl, and painted pictures of them using templates at DLTK.

• Went on a late-night owl hunt in pajamas. 
• Went to our local science museum to visit the owls. We even saw an owl cough up a pellet just inches from us!

• Labeled the body parts of an owl using velcro-ed laminated tabs.

• Read lots and lots of books, of course.

• At the week's end, I wrote down everything the kids could tell me about owls and printed it out. Then we made a lapbook of owls using some of the materials at Lapbook Lessons.

Hoot!