Owl Mini Unit Study Resources
Part of our homeschool rhythm for the year is to have a mini unit study every Monday afternoon. My main reason behind this was because there are so many different topics I want to study with my kids and many of them don’t quite fall under our plan for the year, this is my way of sneaking those topical studies in.
This last Monday was our first mini unit study and we kicked things off with owls!
I started out by having the letter board and a few resources and books about owls out on the table in the morning. As soon as my son woke up and I told him what the letter board said he asked what other groups of animals were called so we spent a few minutes looking that up.
FUN FACT
Owls do not have a good sense of smell,
because of this the great horned owl is one of the only consistent predators of skunks.
I love that I learned just as much about owls as the kids!
We spent some time reading about owls (I’ll list the resources we used at the end of the post) and then the kids took some time to draw some owl pictures.
My daughter drew hers off of Art for Kids Hub tutorials, this one and this one.
My son used the Usborne Big Drawing Book for step-by-step instructions for his owls.
My plan for the unit studies is to do them Monday afternoons and if the kids are really into the topic or if we have more time we will continue learning about it in our extra time throughout the week.
We didn’t have much extra time this week but my daughter did do one of the word searches from the Twig & Moth Nature Word Search & Coloring Pages that we got from the Elementary Bundle last week.
If we had more time I would have looked around for some good informational videos on YouTube. There are some channels that have good information that have videos on owls that would be good if you want to watch some, we may end up looking at them at a later date.
Owls for Kids by Homeschool Pop
Who Knew? Amazing Owl Facts by SciShow Kids
What are Owl Pellets? by SciShow Kids
Here’s a list of the resources that we used and are pictured in the photos above:
Sibley Backyard Birding Flashcards
Owls: Our Most Charming Bird – This book is cute and the drawing of owls are adorable and would be nice to try to copy off of for drawing but the information in it was a little lacking, this is one I would recommend getting out from the library instead of purchasing.
Nature Journal by Kristin Rogers (the book isn’t available by itself any more from what I can tell but if you buy the Nature Journal course you get a free book – totally worth it in my opinion!)
A Field Guide to Western Birds
Prairie Birds – Chris C. Fisher
The Usborne Big Step-By-Step Drawing Book
Firefly Encyclopedia of Animals
Letter Cards – the black letter cards I bought from Amazon a couple of years ago, I really like them but don’t like that they don’t have duplicate letters so I created my own printable ones (and I reversed the colors so they are not so hard on the printer), but when you are writing words without duplicate letters the Amazon ones work great.
Owls in the Family – we didn’t actually read this book this time but we read it last summer, if we were doing a longer owl study I would read it again with the kids
Owl at Home – we used to own this book but I couldn’t find it when I was pulling stuff together. I would have loved to read it this week with my beginning reader but turned the house nearly upside down and still couldn’t find it.
Our little unit study was only about an hour long and here’s what our table looked after (remember, I only have two kids!), good thing we have a big table!
We have our next few weeks of unit studies planned out but if you have ideas for what we should study in the future, I would love to hear them!
We’re doing a mini unit on Vikings this week. We’re going to see the visiting exhibit on Vikings at the Royal Alberta Museum on the weekend so I thought we should brush up on our Viking history. Its been fun! I’m excited to tie it up with the exhibit.