Ah, the dilemma…what to do with all that Halloween candy…besides eat it.

As soon as the kids get all of that candy home they will want to dump it all out into a huge pile and sort out what they like and discard what they don’t. The kids even like to make a game of trading.

Of course I don’t want my kids actually eating all that junk. 5 kids all hopped up on sugar and food coloring, no way!! I have been at a loss of what to do because I don’t want to be “that” mean mom that just takes away all that candy straight away. I used keep it around and dole out a piece or two every once in a while but then I noticed that one or two of the kids may have been sneaking it. It was a better idea just to get it out of the house or put it into storage until next season. If you have been trick-or-treating at my house you have probably gotten last years candy…

Really, I don’t  mind the kids eating a few pieces. To keep their minds off eating all the lovely sweets they have collected but still allow them to have fun with it, I devised this little activity. Ok, so I am sure I am not the first to come up with this idea..anyhow….

After the children have eaten a couple of their favorite pieces, I had them sort the remaining candy. They may sort it however they wish: by size, by color, by type- chocolate, hard, soft. My children all decided to sort by type.

Once the candy had been sorted the kids counted each pile and charted the numbers on a graph. I found this graph that I downloaded for free at abcteach.com.

You could even make your own graph that has a little more room and they could glue candy pieces or wrapper on something like this:

Juliana decided she didn’t have enough room so she stopped.  I may end up making a larger chart for my kindergarten aged son.

The kids got to have fun with all that candy they got and brushed up on some math skills at the same time. What do you do with all that leftover candy?

At this point we have done a lot of research and reading on owls. I even found some coloring pages of owls for the kids to color while I read to them. We went into the woods and listened for owl sounds. The kids even did a book report on owls. The suspense was killing them. They couldn’t wait to get their hands on those pellets!

We started our dissection and had removed all of our little bones of not-so-lucky prey from our little pellets.  It actually took a great deal of time picking through all the fur to find these tiny little bones and pick them clean. I decided this would be better done over the course of two days.

We started day two by getting out our bone sorting chart (similar to this one) and sorting all of our bones. We also found what looked to be insect bug casings, a feather and some other non-identifiable-by-us items.  The kids were then able to identify what kinds of skeleton remains were in their pellet. You can also measure the skulls to help you identify the remains by using this key.

They also counted all of the bones they found and kept a record.

Since most of our pellets contained three or more skeletons, I had the children pick the one they liked the best to mount. On a piece of white card stock I had them glue the skeletons in their reconstructed forms. Alternatively you could have them glue the sorted bones into sections.

Use the old fashioned Elmer’s glue. and lots of it. Glue sticks don’t cut it.

To relieve the stress of not finding all of the bones they needed to complete the skeleton, I had them draw in the missing bones.

The last step was to label the bones. I found this great chart over at www.kidwings.com

This is the one done by my 7 year old 2nd grader. No, she is not dyslexic. And yes she is 7 and still sometimes spells her own name wrong.( I am thinking its her left to right progression that needs work? she is left handed, does that make a difference?)

This is the one by my soon-to-be 10 year old 4th grader.

And last but not least. This example was done by my 11 year old 6th grader.

I think they did an excellent job. After we had finished, Juliana said ” I want to do a human body next!”.  ME: “uh, well…maybe…in college…”…. Which led into questions about what people who dissect human bodies for a career are called. (scientists, pathologists, coroners?) Which led to her change from wanting to be a princess-surgeon-dance instructor to a coroner. Uh huh, we love homeschooling.

I hope you will try the owl pellet dissection lab with your kids. If you do, please come back and share your thoughts and or suggestions.

They absolutely loved it.  My 11 year old pretended to be disgusted (she was so totally into it).

My 7 year old had a little complete and utter freak out, screamed, threw a skull across the room then burst into tears then started screaming “it…it…it was a skull,  I found a skull, I touched a skull..”.

She was soon over the shock and was thrilled to find not one, not two but three skulls in her little pellet.

Adi was probably the most excited to dig in though.

Look at her little freckled face

I decided that since Payton is only 5 that I would help him do his. His attention span is only about that of a flea which I assume is about .160949 milliseconds. He was playing with Legos .89028 milliseconds after finding this little jawbone.

My sweetie little Amelia was none too interested. She sat with us and played Pee-Doh (otherwise known as Play- Doh).

Isn’t she cute?

OH. Yeah, the point. Getting there.

Interested in doing your own owl pellet dissection?

From what I have notice a lot of mommas don’t have the stomach for it. If this is you, I would recommend a virtual dissection. Which you can find at KidWings.

Here is how I began.

I started off last week by hitting the library and checking out every owl book they had.

At this point you might want to go ahead and order your pellets to give them time to arrive. I picked up mine from a homeschool conference but you can also conveniently order your  Owl Pellet Dissection Kit – Mole Skeleton and the Owl Pellet Dissection Kit – Starling Skeleton and also the Owl Pellet Dissection Kit – Vole Skeleton. Don’t forget to get some plastic dissection tweezers and dissection sticks and a good MAGNIFYING GLASS 4 DIAMETER. You can even get a little foam tray to contain it all if you like.

By the way our favorite books were :

for reference:

Owls by Sarah Courtauld : an Usborne book

Owls by Adrienne Mason Owls (Kids Can Press Wildlife Series)

Animal World: Owls by Christine Butterworth

Owls: Zoobooks by Timothy Levi Biel. Owls (Zoobooks)

We read all of the books together and talked a lot about owls. A lot. And went outside to listen for owls. I guess we should try that at night. Don’t judge. We got a good thing going with our bed time. You don’t mess with that. much. ok, so we will do that tonight. sheesh..

Today I explained to them how to carefully unwrap the pellet and showed them how to also very carefully take it apart. I also made up these nifty little Owl Pellet Dissection Worksheets.  You will need a bone sorting chart like this. We had large pellets containing 3-4 skeletons each. It took us about 1 1/2 hours to completely dissect them. My children ranging in age from 7-11 had no problems in completing this on their own.

Tip#1: Do not do this at a table in which you normally eat. Even after being disinfected it still gives me the heebie jeebies.

Tomorrow we will be reconstructing the skeleton, mounting and labeling it.

Dissecting Owl Pellets- Part 2.