Our next lapbook

On finishing our World Cup lapbook I started wondering what to do next with Iona. To begin with, I thought of Bastille Day coming up and planned to do a bit about France. However, nearly everything I found would have been a bit above her level. Then I found 15th July was St. Swithin's Day, so thought of a unit on weather. This was a bit more promising, and I started working on teaching her different types of weather. However, we still weren't inspired. A few days later, though, Iona seemed suddenly very interested in owls, so I asked her if she wanted to do a project on them. She agreed, so I checked up online, and there was much more on owl lapbooks than on either France or weather.

The first thing we did was make a collage out of dried peas, lentils, etc. This tied in with a craft activity at our local children's centre - they were doing the collage on plain paper, so I drew an owl on it and encouraged Iona to fill that in with the pea and lentil mix:

Another thing we did was to make 3 little pine cone owls, using the method we found here: http://thecraftyclassroom.com/CraftBirdOwlPinecone.html. This was very successful, although Iona still enjoys trying to tear them apart!

We made 3 in a nest to tie in with the book "Owl Babies", by Martin Waddell. We've read it before, a year or more ago, and I thought it would be ideal for this unit. We got hold of a copy, as well as a book about nocturnal animals (a hedgehog visited our garden for a couple of nights last week, so we could tie that in). I was quite impressed, on reading "Owl Babies", that Iona knew what an owl's house was called, and she had some idea, when we made the pine cone owls, what the nest was made from. She has also been saying, over the last few days, that owls and hedgehogs come out at night, so she's certainly learning something.

Today we tried playing the Counting Owls game that I found at Homeschool Share: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php. I thought that, at 27 months, Iona might be a bit young for it, still, but that it was worth a try. However, it went really well. Iona didn't really have the idea of playing a board game, but accepted, without too much complaint, that we had to take turns and that she couldn't have all the owl counters but only as many as were shown on the die. It's a great way of reinforcing the idea of 1:1 correspondence when counting, and with only 9 squares to fill with a die labelled 1-3 (twice) it lasted just long enough to maintain her interest. I look forward to playing it again, if I'm able to round up all the miniature owls (Iona's been enjoying giving them swings on her rocking horse's stirrups!).