Challenge Board 5: Owls & Who Dunnits

 Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms

Dissect an Owl Pellet: Owl Pellet CSI

Why Owls & CSI? Well, I've been co-teaching a CSI class in our Homeschool Co-op, and when I was prepping our Animal CSI day, I knew all my kids would enjoy extensions to those activities. With Halloween coming up in just over a month, you could also dive deeper into "bones" on the anatomy side if you wanted to. Here is a neat article that helped inspire the whole thing, which we used to bridge their CSI learning to the owl pellets activity: Animal CSI: Inside The Smithsonian's Feather Forensics Lab.

We then used this funny Critter Scene Investigation from TPT to introduce our pellet activity. Strong readers can collect evidence not only from the pellets but by analyzing and highlighting the nonfiction portion that conflicts with the "suspect testimony" of the owl. For my 7yo, who wasn't quite ready for the CSI worksheet, we used this goofy video to introduce owls and owl pellets: Bird Girl: Great Horned Owl.

As for the owl pellets themselves, there are several places to buy owl pellet kits, which often include plastic tongs like you might get for perlers, and a bone chart to help you ID the bones you find. The pellets are heat sterilized, but you can get a better "CSI" experience by having your students still glove up. You can also find bone charts online.

Listen to an Owl

Learn to Identify Five Owls by their Calls (Audubon Society)

Curious about a specific owl? Try the All About Birds website to listen to their calls and read other facts.

Then see if you can identify these creepy bird calls (Audubon Society).

Draw an Owl

My 7yo loves this realistic owl Art for Kids Hub drawing tutorial. They also have cartoon-y owl tutorials.

Owl Math

I was quite impressed with this owl math mystery picture that can be used for students of any math level. Students answer the math questions using the addition, multiplication or another appropriate worksheet, and the answers help them color in a grid which, of course, turns out to be an owl in a Halloween hat. Or, if you specifically want division with remainders, try this other mystery picture owl.

Compute Height by Measuring Bones (CSI)

With Halloween coming up, perhaps you have a (hopefully fake) skeleton hanging around, and you definitely have a student or two you can measure. Go to CSI Web Adventures and click "No Bones About It" to find out how CSI agents use bones to estimate the victim's height. They also have online activities you can try out under "For Educators."

Read more about how criminal investigators and anthropologists uncover mysteries using skeletons, curtesy of the National Museum of Natural History's "Written in Bone."

Draw an Owl Food Web

Whether your students are 5 or 15, dissecting an owl pellet is the perfect time to construct a food web.

For younger elementary, you can introduce the topic with a video like this All About Food Webs Video, and a book like the Secrets of the Garden: Food Chains and the Food Web in Our Backyard.

Then, for the food web, use the "Memory" printable cards like in this woodland animal printables pack or this one and glue them down in a food web instead. 

Food Chain Frenzy

For older students:

Activity Guide for Upper Elementary: Modeling Ecosystems Food Webs Using Owl Pellet Dissection by Homeschool Hub.

For Grades 5-12: Worksheet & Teacher's Guide from Carolina Kits

Owl Book Favorites

So You Want To Be an Owl by Jane Porter

Owl Puke The Book was perfect for my 10 & 12yo.

Whobert Whover: Owl Detective had my 7yo in stitches.

Little Owl's Night is good for the preK crowd.

Mystery Books For Fun

From early chapter readers to YA and adult-level books.

Nate the Great and the Halloween Hunt

The Mystery of the Screech Owl

Hardy Boys 41: The Clue of the Screeching Owl

Halloween Party by Agatha Christie

Ready for the next challenge board?

Challenge Board #6: ???

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Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms & The Great Wave

Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #3: Gardens

Fairy Storyboarding

Two challenge boards ago, fairies appeared in our fairy houses and wrote the kids encoded letters, which the kids then had to decode. Each student then wrote an encoded letter back, and we also built a more permanent house for our little tenants. Now our fairies have written a letter back, and they need the kids' help!

You can read the fairies' letter here, then read my co-conspirator's letter, mentioned in the letter.

In the letter, we learn that the fairies need help finding new fairy passages to Fairy Land, thus the "Storyboarding" challenge. We'll be photographing our fairies looking for the way home and turning it into a storyboard. And until our fairies find the way home, they are stuck using human snail mail to send letters to their friends overseas in Japan, thus the letter challenge and some of the other tie-ins to Japan. 

Of course, even if you don't have fairies visiting your classroom, you can still use these challenges without the "story" behind them. But if you do want an excuse to communicate with, say, a classroom overseas, here is how we're doing it:  My co-conspirator/writer/teacher and I have secretly purchased copies of the same small dragon figurine, so the figurine can appear to travel back and forth, but without the cost of shipping our little guest each time. For Ichigo's big arrival, my husband is going to place the figurine out while we're out of the house. 

Skelley and Buri, the skeletons who sent our fairies a letter, are on Instagram! My co-conspirator's adorable photographs are definitely an inspiration for the fairies and their letters, and I'm using these photographs to help explain storyboarding and inspire my kids.

Animal Cryptarithms

These animal cryptarithms come from Camp Logic: A Week of Logic Games and Activities for Young People (Natural Math) by Mark Saul and Sian Zelbo. Innovative math challenges like this are my other inspiration for the Challenge Boards! I've used pretty much every activity in Camp Logic for my classes in the homeschool community, and now my kids are old enough to tackle some of them themselves.

Example: W + O = O F

For each of these algebra-like problems, one letter equals one single-digit number. Letters next to each other are 2 and 3 digit numbers, so HEN would be a 3 digit number. Problems are not related, so O can equal 5 in one problem and 9 in another problem. Here's a great example of how to solve them using deduction and elimination, and you can google for more cryptarithms.

W + O = O F

Answer: A one-digit number plus a

one-digit number = two digits. The largest possible is 9+9=18, so O =1, but the two numbers you add must be different numbers because they are different letters. The answer is 9+1= 10

P+P+P=I=G+G

Answer: I must be divisible by 2 and by 3, so I=6

HH+HH=OOT 

Answer: OOT must be even because dividing by two gets you HH. Knowing that, try a few double digit numbers for HH, like 11, 22, 33, etc., and see which equal a three digit number. The three digit number must then have two digits the same, and one a different numeral. The answer is: 55=55=110

Good luck!

Paint The Great Wave

We'll be painting waves inspired by Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Japanese: 神奈川沖浪裏). We'll be following these instructions by deepspacesparkle.com, but I also think paintedpaperart's instructions look good!

To go along with our painting, we'll be reading Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain by Deborah Kogan Ray. 

We'll also watch Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave by ArtFundUK - Warning: this shows a brief clip of art with a completely bare breast (context is breastfeeding). I love how this video mentions Hokusai's influence on European painters, giving a sense of the time period and the interconnectedness of world history, while still keeping it short. 

Write & Mail a Letter

To go along with our story, I addressed an envelope as if my co-conspirator had sent us a letter, sealed it, and used a letter opener to show that the fairies had opened it. The kids are using the envelope to copy down my friend's address to send a letter back. We've sent her letters before, but this is their first time addressing the envelope themselves.

Read & Present...

For my two youngest, we are looking up the word Ichigo and translating it into languages they are interested in. My oldest is learning hiragana and writing Ichigo (いちご) will be fun practice for us both.

For my two oldest, we're researching why Japan has earthquakes and how an earthquake caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. My oldest was just sharing with me something he learned on his own, about how nuclear power is safer than coal, so this is a natural tie-in for us and a great excuse to look into it further.

Tsunami! by Kimiki Kajikawa

Meltdown! Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima

Ready for the next challenge board?

Challenge Board #5: Owls & Who Dunnits

Challenge Board #3: Gardens

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Garden Planning Challenge Sheet

Our strawberries are already flowering, and the kids have been helping us plant and transplant lettuce and spinach. Soon it will be time for summer veggies! Before we start on our summer garden, I gave the kids a garden challenge of their own.

Shhh, it's math. My Garden Planning Challenge Worksheet instructs students to use toothpick "fences" and graph paper to learn about area and perimeter, beginning with guided word problems and ending with open-ended challenges. I designed this worksheet to have something for all three kids (7, 9, and 11). You can find it for free at my TPT page. Enjoy!

 

(PS. Jeff is our garden gnome. There is no reference to him on the sheet.)

Easter Crosswords & Word Scrambles

Easter Word Searches (Nonreligious)

Easter Crossword (Religious)

Easter Word Scramble from Crayons & Cravings

April is Poetry Month!

Our favorite poet is Jack Prelutsky, and you can find his work at Poets.org in: Poems Kids Like.

You can also find lesson plans and poems about spring.

My daughter and I are memorizing Los Pollitos Dicen Pio Pio. We've got the first few lines down. Wish us luck!

We're studying Freedom Train by Langston Hughes, a 1947 poem about segregation in America.

Still Life

Here are a couple of videos we used to help us with our still life challenge. My daughter absolutely adores Art for Kids Hub, do I found this for her: Healthy Snack Stack Folding Surprise. 

A lot of the videos I found on my still life search showed kids how to draw from a drawing tutorial, like Art for Kids Hub does. Instead, I wanted a video that encouraged them to arrange a still life and, you know, draw it. So for a bit of art history and an easy demonstration of how to draw a still life, we used: Paul Cezanne Still Life Project.

Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms & The Great Wave

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Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

For our last Challenge Board, the kids made fairy houses for Saint Patrick's Day. But they made them a little early, and everyone knows that you can only catch a leprechaun on March 17th. But, oh, what's this?! The kids checked the houses early that morning and found new friends, along with the traditional fairy-sized horde of candy.

Tween child attracted a pixie, a being who appreciates camouflage and mischief. He has a dragon hatchling perched on his shoulder.

Middle child attracted a gnome, a being who appreciates good construction and forethought. He is riding a turtle.

Youngest's lean-to attracted a fairy who likes to draw and write, a creative being who knows how to enjoy the capricious winds of life.

How did we learn all this about our new fairy guests? Well, for our next challenge board, the fairies left us coded letters--it seems they're a bit shy and only share their with "kind children and our best fairy friends."

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Coded Message Activity

Encode your own letters here: https://cryptii.com/pipes/alphabetical-substitution

Or print an encoded quote from: https://www.puzzles-to-print.com/cryptograms/index.shtml

We used a simple substitution code and talked about deductions and proof by contradiction. Each message contained predictable or common phrases to help with decoding ("My name is"), and if we had encoded the entire letter, "Dear" and "Sincerely" could also have worked as cues. Each letter also held a seed for what to write back. For example, one letter asked the student to help name a pet dragon.

Tips for printing: 

• Use a font where capital "i" and lowercase L look different, or chose to make them all lowercase.
• Use a large font with double spacing or 2.5 spacing, and increase the space between letters (the kerning). I reprinted mine bigger than shown.
• Leave space on the top or bottom for notes (A=z, etc.)
• If students want to work together, use the same code for each personal message. If they do not, use different codes. I ended up printing a new code for the kid who was determined to solve it himself, so overhearing answers wouldn't throw him.
• Keep a copy of the solutions.

Hints for solving a simple substitution code:

• How many single-letter words are there in the English language? Words with apostrophes? Two-letter words?
• It is okay to guess and wrong. You will be able to tell that you got a letter wrong once you have an impossible word or a phrase that does not make sense.
• The more you solve, the easier it is to solve more by reading what is there and guessing missing words.
• If you have trouble towards the end, check which letters you have solved and try out the ones left.

Encode your return letter by hand:

For beginners, you can write out the alphabet and "slide" the alphabet so that, for example, A becomes B, B becomes C. My own codes were random, and one was the alphabet backwards, so if o=l then l = o as well.

For learning about more complicated codes, we love Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing by Martin Gardner. My oldest is planning to encode his using a wheel cipher. Break the Code by Bud Johnson includes codes for students to break to practice their newfound skills.

Suncatchers

Items needed: Clear contact paper, tissue paper in many colors, construction paper, hole punch, yarn, marker, scissors. 

Prep

1. Draw a simple shape on your sheet of paper. Cut it out, leaving an intact paper border. (Don't cut through your border to get to the middle). The paper border helps keep the contact paper from curling.
2. Cut 2 pieces of contact paper to almost the same size as your sheet of paper. They must be bigger than your cutout, but may be easier to place later if they're a little smaller than your paper.
3. Peel off the backing from one contact piece, leaving the contact paper sticky-side up. Place your paper border over your contact paper. The paper border should have a "window" that is now filled by contact paper. Replace the backing over the contact paper until your student is ready to begin.

Art!

1. (Remove the backing.) Students cut strips of colored tissue paper and tear off pieces to fill the "window." You can prep the tissue paper pieces ahead of time for younger children.
2. Once the window is filled and ready, peel the backing off from the second piece of contact paper and lay it sticky-side down, creating a final protective layer.
3. Hole punch and hang with string. You can also cut the string ahead of time, hole punch ahead of time, etc., but I like to let older students chose their string color and do some of this themselves.

 

DIY Word Searches

We used printable graph paper templates for our word searches, using larger squares for our youngest.

Fairy Names

(Shhhh... Our fairy's names are Shay and dragon Shamrock, Jeff and turtle Nina, and Moira)

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

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