The Superb Owl: A STEAM Lesson

If college had no cost, I would be a life-long student. I love learning, I especially enjoy going back to school to get my master's degree. So far, every class I have taken has been beneficial and interesting. the past couple of weeks I have been attending a class on Instructional Technology. It has been really interesting and I have enjoyed establishing my professional learning network or PLN. In attempt to establish my PLN, I have begun reading blogs from many different educational sources. I use Feedly.com, a website suggested by my professor, to filter all the topics that interest me into folders that make finding information easier. While on Feedly, I found a blog called, "The Superb Owl - A Science Lesson With a Super Bowl Theme". I watched the video the blog shared and decided to create my own STEAM-inspired lesson to teach my kindergarten and first graders the week after the big game.

The "Superb Owl" idea came from the wonderful minds at the blog "Free Technology For Teachers". The article starts with a video on the superb owl. I started my lesson by asking my students if they watched the Super Bowl and if they had a favorite sports team. After assessing the class through a quick class discussion we watched the video. 

After watching the video, we discussed the important physical features of owls. I listed what the students came up with on the board. We talked about big eyes, a beak, feathers, and ears. I drew an example of an owl on the board. After we talked about owls I encouraged the students to think about what kind of activities they enjoyed. We made a list of these on the board. Some examples were swimming, soccer, football, cheer leading, gymnastics, etc. After our list was created I encouraged the students to draw an owl and turn it into doing something that was human, comparing this to the video. 

So far, my students have only drawn the owl as an athlete with a pencil. One of the requirements of the drawing was that it needed to take up the entire page. Next week I plan to have the students add color to their drawings. Once I have finished projects I will post a picture.