Preschool co-op

We had our first preschool c-op of the year last week.There are three families in our group including us. Three four year olds, three two year olds and two two month olds.  This time only one other family came.  I decided to use the theme owls.

We started by reading a pebble plus book Owls by Mary R. Dunn. Pebble plus books are great nonfiction books for young kids. They have very colorful photographs with only a few sentences per page. After the book, we discussed what we learned. The four year olds dictated a few sentences to their moms. Then, the kids illustrated the page themselves. Ollie chose to draw a caterpillar. I'm not sure why. We may need to work on that!

The younger kids worked on a worksheet I found here. It has a ton of cute worksheets with owls. The boys were to color the owl bellies to match the color word below. They mostly just colored.

Next, we did what Ollie had been dying to do--dissect an owl pellet. I picked up a rel owl pellet at the local learning store here. For those we don't know, owls eat an entire animal and then puke up whatever they can't digest into a small ball. The boys loved this and as a matter of fact, we discovered an entire rodent skull inside ours. When I asked Ollie later if he liked it, he said, "Oh yeah. More than you even know." I scored major mommy points for that one. Best $7 I ever spent.

We moved right into a craft after much hand sanitizer. I found this craft in the October edition of Family Fun Magazine. It's my favorite! Ollie chose bright colored baking cups at the store so our owls were pretty funky. This craft used a paper towel roll, two baking cups, two construction paper circles, two hole reinforcer stickers, glue and a black marker. They turned out pretty cute.

For lunch, we made owl sandwiches. I pre-cut a bread body. I used a heart cookie cutter but I rounded the top. I also cut ham to match. Then I cut two large cheese circles and two small ones and one triangle cheese for the beak. The kids ate this up...literally.


 They did one more counting worksheet before free play. I had also printed the scissor practice sheet and the handwriting one from the link above but their wasn't time. All in all, I think it was successful. We've  continued on owls during our school time. Ollie actually told me he wanted an owl party for his birthday and Dawson was begging to do school this morning. I'm hoping to take them to an owl program tomorrow I found through our county conservation club but ollie has been complaining about his ear so we will have to see when our doctor's appointment is!