Owl Babies is a tender tale that reminds the youngest of children that Mommy always comes back.
We read this book as part of Forest Birds Week.
Following this, students engaged in a literacy tray. For those of you not familiar, a literacy tray is a tool educators use to organize plot themes and ideas for young learners.
They can involve sensory materials, counting activities, and words associated with a story. This activity consisted of students using blocks to spell the word HOOT.
Counting feathers involved sorting feathers and matching them to a numeral.
For this activity, students placed the feathers onto a number mat.
This number contained three different nests.
Affixed to these nests were the numbers four, five, and six.
Three dimensional media occupies space defined through the dimensions of height, weight and depth. It includes sculpture, installation and performance art, decorative art and product design.
Two processes are responsible for all three dimensional art: additive, in which material is built up to create form, and subtractive, where material is removed from an existing mass, such as a chunk of stone, wood, or clay.
The additive piece that we created involved a few key materials.
With flour, twigs, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners, we assembled them to create two items: a bird and his nest. Students modeled their nests in several different ways. They enjoyed making up stories about their birds and watching their friends.
The Snowy Owl, also known as the Arctic Owl or White Owl, nests on Arctic tundra habitats throughout its northern circumpolar breeding range—often adjacent to coastal Arctic seas.
This is one of the largest owls in the world, and has the most northerly breeding and wintering distribution of any owl species.
Plumage is unmistakable in this species. Adult males are almost pure white, and adult females are white with brown barring.
As part of our snowy owl component, we created both these creatures and their nests.
The materials used by your little ones include feathers, clay, googly eyes, and sticks!
In addition to learning about the snowy owl, students accessed several areas of development, including lateralization, sensory registration and divergent thinking.
Developing a child’s pencil grasp correctly is not just about helping them learn how to write, it is about teaching them how to grip. That is why we are constantly engaging in activities that help your little ones strengthen their fine motor skills, specifically their pencil grasp.
By age 3 to 4 a young child will learn how to write using the static tripod grasp or quadrupod grasp. This grasp consists of them holding writing utensils crudely and using the whole pads of their fingers on the writing utensil.
There also may still be some wrist and forearm movement to move the pencil, with the fingers not moving, or static. For this activity, we practiced strengthening the muscles responsible for this grasp with a squeezing activity.
As part of our “birds” week, we manipulated feathered clothespins, placing them onto trees in our “rainforests”. Students used their quadrupod grasp to grip the pins, creating a very colorful aviary!
Birds occur on land, sea and freshwater, and in virtually every habitat, from the lowest deserts to the highest mountains.
Our knowledge of bird species can tell us a great deal about the state of the world and wider biodiversity. Patterns of bird diversity are driven by fundamental biogeographic factors, with tropical countries (especially in South America) supporting the highest species richness.
One thing we enjoy about birds is. the variety of colors they display. It is for this reason that we spent a few days talking about the birds of the rainforest.
Tropical rainforests are home to many kinds of birds, including parrots, hornbills, toucans, and raptors like eagles, hawks, and vultures.
To help us learn more about these birds and their colors, we created trees made out of colorful pasta! Using their fingers, students strengthened their tripod grasp by placing dyed pasta into skewers. The result is a beautiful bird forest!
misscarriescorner 