Monday, December 15, 2014

Owls/Birds/Animal Tracks unit

I was a slacker this week. We didn't do much at ALL. Hey, I have a 5 year old who is excited about Christmas coming. I was doing good to get in ANY schooling. :)  We tried, though. We were extending our unit on Owls from last week. This week, we talked about nocturnal animals, forests and animal tracks.

Our sensory bin was bird seed and forest-type animals. I even found a couple of trees to put in there.


We talked about nocturnal animals and diurnal animals. I found this little game on TeachersPayTeachers.com, and we played it. The first part of the game is to guess whether the animal is nocturnal or not. Lily wrote down her predictions in the first column. The game has pictures of animals, and when Lily lifted the flap, there was a yes or no, and she had to write the actual answer in the column next to her predictions. She got most of them right-we have talked about nocturnal animals before, and she remembered most of what she learned.





I DID succeed in getting math and phonics done every day this week. We have been using McRuffy phonics, and Lily enjoys it. It has lots of activities, and isn't just a worksheet type of curriculum. It took a few tries to find a program that Lily enjoys.


I posted these pictures of nocturnal animals on the wall. They were there all week, so Lily could look at them and remember which animals are nocturnal. I also printed out a little sheet to help with writing. Lily had to run to the wall to see how to spell the words, but she got the worksheet completed. I got this activity from Teacherspayteachers.com.



We talked about animal tracks, and how different animals have differently shaped feet. We discussed how you can tell what kind of animal has been close by just by looking at the tracks left behind. I found this animal tracks matching activity on teacherspayteachers.com





For a little bit of art fun, we got out the plastic animals and some paint, and made some animal tracks.




Of course, while discussing animals in the forest, and birds, we HAD to make bird feeders. Lily has noticed that there are not as many birds visiting us now that the weather has cooled off. We put these out front just in case a hungry bird comes by.







Lily LOVES to cook, so I try to incorporate a cooking project in our lessons somewhere. I looked in the Five In a Row cookbook, and the recipes for the story Owl Moon was chicken chili and corn muffins. We talked about how nice it would be to eat something warm like this when returning from an outdoor adventure, such as going owling.



Looks good, Lily!


Lily didn't care for it. She said the chicken was good, but the "soup" part wasn't.  She tried something new, though, and that is what matters!




Lily spent a LOT of time playing with her plastic animals this week. They weren't all forest animals, but she pretended that they were. I love watching her play and use her imagination based on what she is learning. 


We finished up the week with an animal track hunt by the lake. It was pretty warm outside this weekend, so we grabbed Lily's scooter, and off we went!  We saw some duck prints, and some dog prints. We even compared the dog prints we saw to the ones our little dog was making.







That was pretty much our week. Lily did watch a couple of movies about forests on BrainPop.com, which led to a discussion on trees and recycling. We talked about how taking too many trees from the forest can harm the animals' habitat.  We had a fun week, and are ready to move on to talking about seasons and apples!

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