Cute little owls

We are now finishing our study on hibernation and I had planned to make a little hedgehog to conclude our study. Yet, at circle time, as we were going over the names of the animals that go to sleep in winter, one little boy mentioned owls. I reminded him that owls do not hibernate. "I know that", he said. " But they keep an eye on all the animals that are asleep!! That's why owls don't sleep at night! They make sure the others are ok!". I thought it was so sweet. I made sure to use this opportunity  and introduced the term of "nocturnal". I took the example of our story "The Kissing Hand" at the beginning of the year when little Chester the Racoon was going to school at night time. Kids started toalking about hmasters and gerbils (some of them have some at home and knew that these little creatures only come to life really at night time!). It was a great teaching moment and it got the children talking a lot about their own exeriences and about what they knew.  Even though we use themes in our classroom to manoeuvre along our Montessori curriculum, I like the Reggio Emilia approach which leaves a lot of room for improvisation and constructivism. I really like the idea of project approach: sometimes a project is based on what I’ve observed the children doing, sometimes it’s based on things I hear the children talking about or questions they ask (just like happened today). This is why I thought of a little craft for them to do and this is what we ended up with:

 

I got some fabric I had saved up and cut it up into little squares. I made templates of owls using cereal boxes. The children spread the PVA glue onto the template and covered it up with the fabric.

 

 

Then the children added the eyes and beaks made out of felt and finally they glued on buttons to make the eyes look bigger!

 

So cute!!!