All About Owls: Notes for Teachers and Parents

At a glance

Grades: Written for Second Grade. Works well for Third Grade too.
Time: About six to eight sessions: choosing an owl and researching (alongside classroom science time), collecting pictures, planning, three or four sessions to build, and a last one to check and print.
You need: An owl for each student to research, library books or safe websites, computers or Chromebooks with Google Slides or PowerPoint, and a color printer for the finished pages.
Students will: Research five facts about one owl, collect and organize pictures with their sources, turn facts into short speech bubbles, and lay out a six-panel page for a class book.

Before you teach it: make a page yourself

Build one finished page before you teach this, start to finish: pick an owl, fill in the Fact Finder, collect pictures, plan, and build the page from the templates. If you have not made the final product yourself, you will not be able to teach a child to make it.

You will find the spots where children get stuck, such as a picture that will not resize, a bubble tail that points the wrong way, or words that will not fit.
You will know how long each step really takes, so you can plan your sessions.
You will have a finished page of your own to show the class, and your own page is better than any example from the web.
Parents can do this too. Making a page together first makes it much easier to help a child.

Where this fits

This project began as part of a larger owl unit in the classroom. Each student chose one owl from a list, researched it, and made one page of an All About Owls graphic novel. The finished pages were printed, bound into a book, and shared in the classroom library and outside the classroom door.

In the lab, projects follow three strands that weave together through the year: productivity tools (office tools, image creation and editing, video), STEM (spreadsheets, programming, robotics, building web sites), and research with ways of reporting that go beyond written text. This project is in the research strand. Students gather facts, then communicate them in a format that is easy to read yet compelling: a graphic organizer that looks like the page of a graphic novel.

It was first taught with ComicLife, a comic-making program the school had a license for. Most families will not have that program, so the project is now built around Google Slides and PowerPoint. Students still make a comic page: panels, pictures, and speech bubbles. At this time of year (November) most second graders are still new to Slides and PowerPoint, so the templates give them a head start. By the end of the year they can build pages from scratch!

Why a graphic novel?

The page is a graphic organizer. Six panels mean six small, doable jobs, and the panel format makes students cut each fact down to a few words.
Speech bubbles change the writing. When the owl is talking, students write short, lively sentences instead of copying paragraphs.
A book is a real audience. Students know their page will be printed and bound, so they take care with it.
The "graphic novel" name is the one the children and teachers use, and it makes the finished book sound like something worth reading.

Choosing owls and researching

Give students a list of owls (Meet the Owls lists 18 owls of North America plus Another owl of your choice, and you can edit it). Each student picks one. Having a variety makes a better book. Several students can share a kind of owl if the class is large.
Reading level matters. Many owl pages are far above Second Grade. Library books, a read-aloud, or a grown-up reading with a student all help. Students look for a small number of things, not for everything.
The Fact Finder asks for five things: size, where it lives (habitat and range), what it eats (prey), and two cool facts that many people do not know.
Size: look for length and wingspan, with units. Students can compare to something they know, like a ruler or a cat.
Where it lives: a habitat (forest, desert, grassland) and a range (what part of the world). The range map goes in the Picture Collection.
Cool facts: ask "What made you say WOW?" A cool fact is one a classmate would probably not know.
Each card has a Where I found it line. Saying where a fact came from is a research habit worth starting young.

Collecting pictures

The Picture Collection has six labeled frames (up close, at home, range map, food, flying or hunting, and a free choice), plus a second slide for extras. It keeps pictures organized before the page is built, which matters at this age.
Keep picture searching guided. The pages send students to a short list of sites (All About Birds, the Audubon owl photo article, San Diego Zoo Kids) and tell them to work with a teacher, parent or guardian if they need anything else. An open image search can turn up things you would not choose, so students should not search on their own. Wikimedia is left out on purpose because many districts block it for younger children.
Credit: students type where each picture came from. This is a good habit, and it also helps you if a picture needs to be replaced later.
Picture rights: a printed class book used for learning is a different case from a page posted on the open web. If you plan to post pages online, use pictures that are public domain or have a license that allows reuse, and credit them. U.S. government sites such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are good places to start. Photos on bird-guide sites usually belong to the photographers.
Range maps from a bird guide are fine to screenshot for a classroom book, and they are a nice way to teach the screenshot keys.

The page templates

There are four layouts (Classic Six, Big Splash, Staircase, and Tall and Short) and a blank page. Each has a title box, six numbered panels, and a By: line. They look different, but every one has six panels, so every student can plan the same way.
All pages are 8.5 by 11 inches, so they print on regular paper and bind into one book.
The numbered orange circles show the reading order. Students can leave them or delete them.
Students can use the blank page to build a layout from scratch. That is a good challenge for confident students and for students who finish early.
Google Classroom: assign the templates with "Make a copy for each student" so every student gets their own file.
Prefer PowerPoint? The same layouts are on the site as a PowerPoint file.

Speech bubbles and fonts

Speech bubbles are shapes (Insert, Shape, Callouts). They teach students to draw, resize, and move shapes, and to type inside them. These are skills that carry over to everything else in Slides and PowerPoint.
Students drag the yellow dot on a bubble to aim its tail at the owl.
Fonts are a fun skill demo. In Google Slides, students can click More fonts and add a Google Font (Bangers, Comic Neue, and Patrick Hand are good for comics). Encourage one fun font for the title and one easy-to-read font for the bubbles.
PowerPoint does not have Google Fonts, so students choose from the font list.
If words do not fit, the answer is usually fewer words. A bubble has about 10 to 15 words.

The checklist

The checklist on the main page lists everything a top-level page includes. Students tap each item as they finish it, which turns the expectations into goals they can see. Check marks are saved only in that browser. Students can type their name and print the checklist to turn in with their page.

The class book

Print each page in color, portrait, one per page.
Order the pages by kind of owl, or alphabetically by the student’s owl.
Add a cover, a title page, and an About the Authors page. A page with a map showing where all the owls live is a nice extra.
Bind the book with a comb binder or rings. Put it in the class library, and display it outside the classroom door.
Print an extra copy for the school library, and consider one for each family.

At home

Pick an owl together and read about it a little each day. Library books are a great start.
Help your child with the Fact Finder, but let your child choose the words. Short is good.
Google Slides is free with a Google account, so you do not need PowerPoint.
Homeschooling? Make a real book. Your child makes the owl page, and you and your child can make a few more pages to fill it out: a cover, a title page, a page about the author, an owl word list (talon, prey, nocturnal), or a page that compares two owls.
The last slide in the page templates is blank for exactly this. Draw boxes, add pictures and speech bubbles, and try a new font.
Print the pages on regular paper and bind them with a comb binder, rings, or even a stapler and tape. Then put the book where visitors can find it!

Saving and privacy

The Fact Finder, the Page Plan, and the checklist run in the browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and there are no accounts.
What students type is saved only on that computer and browser. On shared computers, have students print before they leave.
The read-aloud buttons use the voice built into the device.

Standards

Common Core Writing W.2.7: participate in shared research and writing projects.
Common Core Reading, Informational Text RI.2.5 and RI.2.7: use text features to find key facts, and explain how images help clarify a text.
Common Core Speaking and Listening SL.2.5: add drawings or other visual displays to clarify ideas.
ISTE Standards for Students: Knowledge Constructor and Creative Communicator.
Science: connects to a unit on animals and their habitats (for example, NGSS 2-LS4-1). Check your own state’s standards.

Resources

Books are still the best kid-level source. National Geographic Readers: Owls is a Level 1 reader that is a good fit for many Second Graders.

Your school or public library is the best resource for this project: owl books at many reading levels, and a librarian who loves helping students choose.