Satori Smiles

The Owl Puke book has several fun ideas, an Owl Puke Card is one of them. Open and shut the owls mouth by opening up the card! Satori had to go and make colorful Mr. Day-Glo owl here. We had our own idea to add a few furry realistic feathers, otherwise one might not be able to guess what creature this was. One of the things we learned, is the tufts on the head of owls are not their ears! But feathers do play an important part of their excellent hearing.

The gaping mouth left us an idea to make our own quick fake owl pellet.

And our finished Owl Puke card, complete with owl pellet!

Not sure if you’ve noticed in the recent photos, but do you like Satori’s bang cut she gave herself the day before Thanksgiving?  Here she is in front of our new Christmas tree we have to decorate yet. Her Snowy Owl Kacy has been at her side every minute of the day.

Tonight we should be finally finishing up our read-aloud book – Poppy. Coincidentally, it features an owl. It has been very enjoyable for the whole family! Just wish Daddy could be here every night to hear the story.

I promised to go over our Owl Puke book and activity over a month ago, and here it is! We finally cracked open our  Owl Puke project today and were very impressed. The book itself is super informative, and we learned so many interesting facts about owls.  They mate for life. They can read the bottom of an eye chart from one mile away. They can hear a mouse under a foot of snow and dive down to get it. This is one of the coolest reasons I love to homeschool, I get to learn new things too!

Before we got down to the gross-out activity, we dug out Satori’s Snowy Owl, practiced moving its head 270 degrees to look around both back shoulders in one move. Hung out on OwlPages.com and checked out Owl Calls and Photos. Finally we prepared for the event. The book kit contains this yellow sorting tray and the sterilized owl pellet. All you really need is a clean space to work and a toothpick.

Satori was very excited to “dig in”. She kept calling the skeleton a fossil, and I kept having to correct her. She said she was a real archaeologist now! I didn’t have the heart to correct her that time. Here she is with her kids rubber gloves that were too big, but she wanted to wear them anyway. In the photo below you can see part of the skull of the owl’s victim.

She separated the bones from what looked like fur and put them in the container.

The Owl Puke book really helps you figure out what all the bones are, and it was no problem putting them in the right spots! Neither Satori nor I had the patience to sort out all the tiny vertebrae though. We also thought we had two sets of legs, as we had 4 hips and 4 lower legs. The book also helped us narrow down which animal we had. In our case, we had either a small rat (or maybe a big mouse with large protruding teeth).

Also with the book’s help, we laid out our skeleton. Not a perfect job, but good enough for us and Satori’s dwindling attention span by this point! All in all, such a fun learning activity…

We concluded the owl puke activity by watching about 20 minutes of YouTube on owls!

Since we are reading Poppy (a book about a mean ole owl) and the fact that Satori started to open her owl pellets, I’ve decided to start our rowing of Owl Moon.

We shall learn about owls, moon phases, bird predators, and more.

The most exciting thing is probably our Owl Puke we examine. Owl Puke has a more agreeable name of owl pellets, which consists of a fuzzy mass of bones, hair, feathers, teeth and exoskeletons upchucked about 20 hours after a bird of prey eats. It doesn’t have to be an owl. There is actually a book I’ve ordered that contains a sterlized owl pellet, tray and chart. Once we get back from our London trip, we will dissect two more owl pellets, this time with gloves and tweezers.

Like I said, Satori opened one up already. Our cats went crazy over this new toy, before I realized they had caught on to what it was. You can see a skull and bones here, and probably feathers and/or fur. Next to it is our current read-aloud Poppy, which right in the beginning features one of the characters as an unfortunate owl pellet.

Speaking of birds of prey, Satori got very excited today when she saw a huge bird! She had me come running with my camera. It looks like a hawk.