A Walk in the Dessert and Owl Activities

HERE at Teacherspayteachers Brian Sweeney made up a FREE POWERPOINT to use as an introduction to wildlife of the desert. I LOVED it and so did the kids. Thanks Brian!

We learned about the animals of the desert and we all wrote OWL reports. Did you know small owls live in Saguaro Cactus of the desert?

An Owl Crossword Puzzle we found on the back of the Scholastic News!

Scholastic News about Owls I’d saved over the years. It fit perfectly in with what we were learning!

I had about  6 books to read to the kids for the week. I usually do it after recess because that is right at our science and social studies time so it works well.  Here are the text sets that I have purchased.

A Walk in the Desert

Desert Giant: The World of the Saguaro Cactus by Barbara Bash

Owl Babies by Martin Waddell
Owls by Gail Gibbons
White Owl, Barn Owl by Michael Foreman
Owl Moon by Cynthia Rylant
Cactus Hotel by Brenda Z. Guiberson  

OWL MATH –
HERE at Homeschoolshare  I found a DARLING OWL CARD SET  that you could do some OWL Themed math games with. We chose to do a OWLS MAKE A DOUBLE. Kids would ask for numbers from each other like OLD MAID but they then had to add the total out loud and the other 3 players check their doubles adding.

Card games are always a fun way to practice math facts.

Owl math card game

I added some triple digit subtraction to this owl worksheet for a math activity.

Cutting out our math games. Each table had a different color of cards so it would be easy to organize. Everybody put their initials on the backs of their own cards for easy cleanup.  It is now a fast finisher math game.

 If you give each child a sheet of owls on cardstock and they cut them out, you should have 36 in each group of 4 kids and that is enough to play the game. We also played MAKE A 12 or more. Cards are layed down with owl numbers showing. When it is your turn you call out a number above 12 and then use 2 to 3 cards to collect that sum.

We had fun playing addition math games with our OWL MATH CARDS

Here at 2nd Grade Rocks were some fun activities to do with vocabulary with our Reading Streets Story A WALK IN THE DESSERT. I remember at first I just loved this story, because it teaches kids all about the Sugauro Cactus, which is a giant cactus that grows in the dessert. It also mentions nocturnal animals in the story, and OWLS. I focused on the owls and we did some simple reports.

Bulletin Board for our OWL REPORTS and OWL ART
Owl Reports turned out really great!

Owl reports. Many kids got owl books from the library to get a few research facts from. We read lots of weekly readers too and wrote facts on a giant owl paper.

 

Here are our finished OWL REPORTS and OWL ART PROJECTS! We used scrapbook paper and construction paper, wiggly eyes too.

2nd grade links .

Compound words class activity that I found at Jan Brett’s website can be found HERE at Jan Brett.com

We found these bird houses at our cabin at Bear Lake a few weeks ago. The hubs took the power washer to them after we were sure the birds were all gone. It looked like a little bird condo! I wonder if they would have kept building on?
Bear Lake Bird Condos for sale….going cheap!

Great Powerpoints can be found here to introduce amazing words vocabulary. We use these words for our weekly vocabulary test.

Amazing Words we used for our Vocabulary Test for A WALK IN THE DESERT.

This video shows how Owls can hear their prey underneath the ground in small burrows. Amazing!

Owl Coloring Page 5
http://www.colormegood.com/colormegoodPDFthumbnails/animals/owl-coloring-pages/owl-coloring-page-05.pdf We used this for our writing paper. I just added dotted lines to it.

Words to songs in the Reading Streets Songbook can be found HERE. We sang songs about the dessert too. It is one of my favorite weeks to study animals of the desert. And all the kids did such a great job on owl reports.