Around the World with FIAR: Owl Moon and the Arctic Circle

Owl moon is a book about a father taking his child out one evening to hunt for owls.  We slowly worked through the FIAR manual and Bible and Character manual produced by FIAR.  However, my main goal for using these books was geographical, just to introduce the little ones to world geography.

I would be using a lot of artistic licence when demonstrating where each book was set.  For Owl Moon, which I believe is set in (top) North America, I checked the range of the Great Horned owl.  This owl can be found in parts of Alaska and so theoretically this book could have been set in Alaska.  Alaska is handily part of the Arctic circle, which was the geographical region I was covering during our winter term.

Geographical Theme for the Term

The countries which make up the Arctic Circle, in this case Alaska:

A6 placed our story disc inside the arctic circle in Alaska:

Non Geographical Theme for Owl Moon

Night Animals focusing on owls:

In my book box

Granny and I shared the reading of these over the course of the week:

 Geography

These are the activities we covered each week.  I will be using the same set of photos for each FIAR post on the Arctic circle.  This is to save time and also negates the need for me to interrupt the children’s schooling to take a photo.  The books we will read through are:

Besides reading the above books, we made up an animals of the world map and looked out for any of the animals we pictured in the book:

We also built up our large foam map of the world.  I had the little ones spray shaving foam onto the map to show where Antarctica and the Arctic circle were.  They used the appropriate plastic animals and played for a while in the ‘snow’:

To reinforce the names and position of the continents and oceans they played spin the continent:

and a great little board game called Atlas Adventures:

In the Prop Box

I set up our very own owl moon experience.  A couple of years ago when we were doing the BFIAR curriculum, one of the books we worked on was ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  A6 remembered this without any prompting from me and (having memorized the book back then) began the whole chant replacing ‘bear hunt’ with owl hunt!

We attempted to make our own binoculars from toilet rolls:

They made a fluffy ‘owl moon’ from a paper plate and cotton wool which we hung on our beams.  I also hid some of their owl toys:

They got all dressed up in their very best owl hunting gear…..

…..deciding to use our real binoculars rather than their home made ones:

And off they went on their very own owl hunt:

They successfully found each owl I had hidden and had a lot of fun in the process.

Science

• I bought some owl pellets for them to pull apart and investigate.  The older girls helped with this activity:

• I read the following Read and Learn book on Night Animals: Where are the Night Animals.  I would be assigning one science book per week and this particular series fit the bill nicely:

Arctic Lap Journal

Although there are many lap pieces available for each individual FIAR book I have decided that my primary learning goals for the girls are geographical.  Therefore with each continent we study we will be slowly completing one large continent lap book, adding various lap pieces each week:

 

 Owl Arts and Craft Activities

• Both girls made some little owls from an inexpensive kit from Sainsbury:

• A6 sewed an owl pillow which she now takes to bed with her each night:

• They also made some owl ornaments:

Further Resources