Montessori-Inspired Owl Activities Using Free Printables

By Deb Chitwood from Living Montessori Now 

Owls are a very versatile theme. Online, I found owl activities for an owl classroom theme, fall owls, Owl Moon winter owl activities, valentine owls, Earth Day ("Give a Hoot! Don't Pollute!") owls, and owls used in the study of birds. 

  
I had lots of fun finding printables for my free owl printables post at Living Montessori Now. Here, I've created some owl activities using free printables for preschoolers through first graders. These activities all work especially well with a fall or classroom theme, although they should work with most owl themes. 

You'll find many activities for preschoolers through first graders throughout the year along with presentation ideas in my previous posts at PreK + K Sharing. You'll also find ideas for using free printables to create activity trays here: How to Use Printables to Create Montessori-Inspired Activities. 

At Living Montessori Now, I have a post with resource links of Free Printables for Montessori Homeschools and Preschools. 

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links at no cost to you. 

"5 Little Owls" Activities

   
I LOVE doing songs and fingerplays with preschoolers! I have a fun series at Living Montessori Now with free songs and rhymes for circle time. Right now, "Free Educational Songs for Circle Time," "Free Fall Songs and Rhymes for Circle Time," and "Free Halloween Songs and Rhymes for Circle Time" are especially popular. 

For the "5 Little Owls" activity tray, I used the free Owl Tot Pack (“5 Little Owls”) from Our Little Monkeys. During the winter, you could use the “5 Little Owls” tree and owls from Homeschool Share. I also used the 5 Little Owls Printable Puzzle by Growing in PreK and K at Teachers Notebook. 

I simply printed out, cut apart, and laminated the pieces. If you're wondering, this is my favorite laminator. I put the puzzle pieces in a pencil box and placed everything on a Multicraft wooden tray. 

"My Owl Numbers Book" Tray

   
For this activity, I used My Owl Numbers Book by Amy from Wildflower Ramblings at Hip Homeschool Moms. Creating the owl numbers book is a fun way for children to work on cutting and stapling skills along with math skills. Some children will be able to use the booklet as reading practice, too. 

Owl Paper Cutting Tray 

   
This tray uses the Owl Give You Four Free Bookmarks printable by mzmary at Teachers Notebook. For simpler cutting activities, you could add the cutting page from the Owl Tot Pack from Our Little Monkeys. The Owl Tot Pack includes "finish the pattern" strips that could also be used as cutting strips where children cut between the owls. 

Owl Shapes 

 

I think this activity is TOO CUTE (and creative)! I love the Silly Shaped Owls from Teach With Me. I traced the shapes onto one color of craft foam. I only used one color because of the Montessori principle of isolation of quality. 

 

Here, the owls and shapes are a matching activity. I used a Montessori Services rug for my layout. In addition to matching shapes, children could trace the foam shapes. You could also have construction paper available for children to create their own shape owls. 

Owl Letter Tumble Tray 

This activity uses the Owl Letter Tumble printables from PreKinders. The child simply tumbles the letter owls onto the black felt (or other black cloth used as the night sky) and then matches the letter owls to the letters on the letter chart. Younger children can use this as a matching activity while older children can use this to review phonetic sounds or alphabetical order.

Owl Addition 

   
For this addition activity, I used Owl Number Matching Cards from KidSparkz and Maths Symbols Cards from Activity Village. The felt owls are Creatology felt stickers from Michaels craft store. 




 

I used only 10 felt owls and owl number cards 1-10. For each equation, the child could choose how many owls to use for each addend and them count them to find the sum. 

Finish Drawing the Owl Activity 

 

This is a more challenging activity using the Complete the Drawing Owl printable from Making Learning Fun. It's nice to have some special drawing materials such as the Faber-Castell graphite sketch set, which is what I have in the pencil box on the tray. 

More Free Owl Printables and Fall Activities 

Go to today's post at Living Montessori Now for links to lots of owl freebies from around the blogosphere: Free Owl Printables and Montessori-Inspired Owl Activities.

For October calendar observances and activities, see my October Themed Activities for Kids at Living Montessori Now. You'll also find many fall themes and activities in my "Montessori-Inspired Fall Activities" post. 

If you'd like to focus on manners with children, please check out my eBook Montessori at Home or School: How to Teach Grace and Courtesy! It's written for anyone who'd like to feel comfortable teaching manners to children ages 2-12.

Have a happy autumn!

 
Deb Chitwood is a certified Montessori teacher with a master’s degree in Early Childhood Studies from Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England. Deb taught in Montessori schools in Iowa and Arizona before becoming owner/director/teacher of her own Montessori school in South Dakota. Later, she homeschooled her two children through high school. Deb is now a Montessori writer who lives in San Diego with her husband of 39 years (and lives in the city where her kids, kids-in-law, and baby granddaughter live). She blogs at Living Montessori Now.

Why Dads Don't Take Parenting Classes

A young intern working on a research project contacted me to ask me a few questions about dads, parenting classes and getting them to engage more with their kids. He told me that his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was developing intervention programs to support fathers and to find the best ways of engaging them in programs.

He implied there was a belief that men don’t like to take parenting classes and they were trying to find out why. I shared with him that I do occasionally get some dads who contact me for parent coaching or even some who show up at my parenting classes, but mostly it’s the moms who aren't afraid to seek out help.

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One of the questions he asked me was, do I interact differently with women as opposed to men in my coaching sessions. I told him that a large part of my training with parents is to help them understand the emotional intelligence aspect of their child and if their emotional needs aren’t met, there is likely to be less cooperation and more misbehavior. Moms get the emotional intelligence of parenting more easily than dads do. Therefore I have to engage the fathers in other ways.

So he asked me if I use different teaching methods when I have men in the sessions. I told him that we men tend to be more visual learners and therefore, I use more video demonstrations or role play to create common situations they may find at home with their kids.

Next he asked me, “What concerns do fathers tend to bring up in contrast to those brought up by mothers?” My answer to that was that women seem to bring up more questions that involve relationships, feelings, and communication. Men on the other hand seem to ask more questions about day-to-day cooperation, following through with tasks, and examining children’s skills and abilities.
His last question was about why dads seem to be less interested in parenting classes.

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Based on dads that I’ve spoken to, some men feel that it is a sign of weakness to admit that you need help in parenting and just do the best they can, while others believe that parenting and discipline is more of a woman’s job and just leave it all to them. There is one more group of dads I’ve noticed who have the “I gave at the office” mentality. In other words, they believe they work hard all day long and disciplining the kids should not be one of their responsibilities when they get home.

To women who want to know how to get their husbands on board to help more with the kids, or to get them to join you at parenting classes, here are some quick tips. Communicate what you want from your partner clearly and don’t assume anything. DO NOT criticize him when he makes an attempt to discipline and he fails (instead encourage him), especially in front of the kids. Finally, make the effort to have private conversations with him to get on the ‘same page’ with parenting before handling certain situations with the kids.

Bill Corbett has a degree in clinical psychology and is the author of the award winning book “Love, Limits, & Lessons: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Cooperative Kids,” in English and in Spanish.  He is happily married with three grown children, two grandchildren, three step children, and lives in Enfield.  You can visit his Web site www.CooperativeKids.com for further information and parenting advice.

Dollar Tree Treasures and Lots of Ideas!

Hi! I'm Carolyn Kisloski from Kindergarten: Holding Hands and Sticking Together.  I wanted to call this "Dollar Tree Finds and Million Dollar Ideas" but that sounded like a little much.  But, here are some great finds and some fun ideas I like to do with them and wanted to share with you.  How is that?!

My list said "leaf stickers."  I left the store many, many dollars later with many, many treasures- and no leaf stickers. These are some of the bags I hauled into school after my trip.
                                      

That is the beauty of the Dollar Tree.  Have you ever gone in, and for some bizarre reason not gotten a cart?  I KNOW-  what?!  I've done that, and then when my arms are overflowing, I sheepishly make my way back to get one, reminding myself never to do that again.

Tip of the day:  ALWAYS get a cart at Dollar Tree.  EVEN if your list has one item on it.  It's like eating Pringles.  You can't eat just one, and you won't get just one thing.  I think it's almost impossible.  Just skip right over those baskets, too.  They fill up wayyyy too fast.

Let's get started!

Instead of  leaf stickers, which I couldn't find, I got these beautiful leaves.
                                            

We made fall trees with the leaves, and practiced writing a sentence correctly. They stuck onto construction paper really well with Elmer's glue. If one was thinking about falling off, I just stapled it on to be sure it would stay.  I had the kids tear brown paper for the trunk.

I thought the leaves would also be fun for a Sight Word Write, so I wrote a sight word on each leaf, put a magnet on back, and made a tree on my white board.  The children have to write the words on the leaves that have fallen from the tree. They  do this after they finish their morning work.  They can just write the words on the back of their paper, or use this recording sheet.  I just change the fallen leaves each morning.   

If you would like a copy of the recording sheet, just click the picture below. 

Wouldn't this activity be precious with these leaves?  I found this picture on Pinterest, with no link back to anything- so if it is yours, I am sorry I'm not giving you credit. I love it!

This bulletin board from Boards Galore would be fun to make with these leaves, too.  You could hide children's faces, sight words, letters, or numbers in the leaf pile!

Don't you just LOVE these leaves from TypeInspire?  They would be so much fun for making names or sight words in fall!  I'm not sure what I want to do with them, but here they are if you can think of something fun. I just loved them.

Next, I found this packet of Halloween characters. There are 6 characters in a packet, and a sheet of stickers to go with each character.  My kids LOVED making them!

I had each of my children write "I am a ____________" and try to hear the sounds for the character they chose.  This was one of the first sentences they tried to write.  It was a great chance to have them practice leaving a space between words and put a period at the end of the sentence because it was where the reader would stop. 

I bought 5 of each of these animals last year to use for my reading buddies during independent reading time. I have 4 or 5 children in each group.  Each group has 15 minutes of reading time on the rug each day. They can have a reading buddy to read the books to, so these worked great to go along with some of our reading strategies. 

Stretchy Snake to stretch out the words

Lips the Fish to get your mouth ready for that first sound

Chunky Monkey to look for the chunks in words

I also bought 5 of each of these great camo helmets,vests, and binoculars.  

I am going to have 2 different camo centers for the kids.   The first one is going to be this mat that the children have to use to match the army guy's word to the word on the mat, and then record 10 of the words after they match them.  I just painted the fabulous landscape on a piece of cardboard from the back of one of my chart paper packs.  Of course the children will have to wear their uniforms when they accept this mission!

The next center is going to be a Camo Write the Room. I am going to put the camo sight words all over the room. They can wear their vest and helmet, and use the binoculars to find the words.  I also bought a camo tablecloth (for $. 97 at Walmart).  I was thinking I may put that up on a wall and put the sight words on that another time just to switch it up.   If you would like a copy of the recording sheets, just click on the picture below. 

 

If you would like a copy of the camo sight words, just click this picture.

You can also find camo pencils that  would be so much fun to use for these centers. 

These great dinosaurs would also work well on my mat (since it is so simple  versitile...). You could write sight words or letters on these guys!

I got these awesome mustaches for "Mm" day.  We all need a good mustache day.  After they wear them for a class picture, I am going to have them draw a big picture of themselves on paper and add the mustache to that to get the mustaches home safe and sound.  That way, the mustache will have another purpose, won't get lost somewhere, and the kids won't be wearing it all day- only until they use it for the picture they draw.

I am always on the look out for prizes to keep in my prize bin, too.  For Christmas and the end of the year, we play Bingo.  As each child wins, he/she gets to go to the prize table to choose a prize.  The kids LOVE this.  It's so easy for me, too.   I  always have a good variety of prizes on hand.

I find this is also handy in case a child is home sick for quite a while or breaks a bone or something and needs a little "pick-me-up" treat bag.

These are my latest additions.  I have lots of cars, trucks, balls, wands, coloring projects already.  I loved this glitter dough.  The glow in the dark snakes would also be good separated and given as "stretchy snake" reading and writing reminders.

I LOVED these wings.   The little skirts were too precious, too.  I bought wings for each of my girls. I only have eight girls. I'm not sure when I'm going to give these to the girls, but I do know I want a picture of each little girl wearing her wings.

I saw this sweet saying, and I am thinking that I may make something with each girl's picture and this saying for a gift for the parents. 

I also got some tiaras for my girls for sometime special, because who can resist a tiara?

I am going to go back and get something special for my boys next.  They had cowboy hats and vests, so I may get those for my little guys.

 Maybe I'll add this little saying to their cowboy pictures.

I'll probably just get EVERYONE a cowboy hat, and maybe we will make paperbag vests to go with them, because they have some pretty colored hats!

I also got a few of these finger lights just in case some of my readers need a little extra reminder to point to each word as they read.  These are so much fun!

I hope you found some fun ideas to use for this time of year.  Have fun shopping! I'd love you to stop over to my blog Kindergarten: Holding Hands and Sticking Together and follow me on Facebook.

Thank you for stopping by!