Nocturnal Animals and a freebie!

Hey friends! Long time, no post. I've missed you all. I wanted to post on what my Explorers are learning this week. It's my favorite unit to teach - - nocturnal animals! Here is a little glimpse into what we will be doing. 

We will be making Owl fact books from Deanna Jump's unit. These are wonderful for teaching sentence structure, labeling, and illustrations. We will record some of our new learning on a have/can/are chart and afterwards, dissect owl pellets!

I purchased an owl pellet kit through a STEM grant and my students (last year) LOVED it! You can get a similar kit from Amazon {here}. 

This great little poster was included with the kit and showed the bones students might find when they dissect their pellets. Students were able to bring their bones up to the poster and figure out what part of the Vole it was from. A Vole is a small rodent, resembling a mouse, but with a stouter body. Here is a picture of a Vole skull we found. 

My students begged to take their findings home and show their parents. They were so excited! I'm not so sure my parents were, though. ha ha My explorers, this year, are already counting down to dissection day! It is definitely a wonderful, hands-on learning experience. I plan on teaching about Bats as well and I want to begin with a KWL chart. Here is one that I've put together. We will begin adding to it, tomorrow.

Afterwards, we will compare and contrast Bats to Owls and make a Venn Diagram. 

This wonderful idea stemmed from my bloggy BFF - Katie Mense and it came together so well. The bat pattern is from Cara Carroll and the Silly Shaped Owls can be found here. If you're interested in doing something like this with your students, you can grab the Venn Diagram labels and a recording sheet below.