Tot School: Birds

This post is way over due... as all but one of the activities were done in about mid-April. I just haven't gotten around to posting it until now.

Will and I have been really interested in studying birds this spring. (All on a pretty basic level, of course.) He had been noticing and pointing out robins through the windows or while we were driving or walking and always talked about them or asked about them. So we started with borrowing a bunch of bird books from the library. You'd think so many books on this topic might bore a child, but not so! He enjoyed them all.

Here are what we checked out:

A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins

Topics: how birds make their nests; different types of nests; gestation of a baby bird - what they look like and how they change in the weeks after hatching; a whole spread of the different types of feathers; how to "help" the birds build their nests. You'll see below that Sophie and I tried to "help" the birds with nest materials. :)

How Do Birds Find Their Way? by Roma Gans
Topics: names of birds; new vocabulary word: "migrate"; how high and how far they travel; theory that birds have an "internal compass" and can always find their way home.

The Robin in the Tree by Dana Meachen Rau

Will read quite a lot of this book to me.

Robins: Songbirds of Spring by Mia Posada

Topics: spring rituals of robins; their songs: "Cheer-up, Cheerily!"; babies are called "fledglings" and have spotted orange breasts.

My Spring Robin by Anne Rockwell

A girl claims a robin as "her spring robin" and waits all winter for its return, searching through all new signs of spring to find it: crocuses, forsythia bushes, magnolia trees, daffodils, earthworms, etc. until she finally hears its song again.

Just How Long Can a Long String Be? by Keith Baker

The many purposes/lengths of a string. "A string's just as long as I need it to be."

Flip, Flap, Fly! by Phyllis Root

Cute rhymey book with lots of babies! Sophie liked this one.

Little Hoot by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Author of Little Pea, which we LOVED. This is another book that cracked me up to read to Will because his expression and obvious confusion showed that he thought we were reading about an alternate universe. I have to share some excerpts from this book, because there are so many cute ones! First of all, it begins with "Once, up on a branch..." Get it? Like "Once upon a time...?" Little Hoot's parents make him stay up very late because he is an owl and must learn to be wise and nocturnal. But Little Hoot just wants to go to bed. :) "All my other friends get to go to bed so much earlier than me! It's not fair."... "When I grow up, I'm going to let my kids go to bed as early as they want." Then when he was finally allowed to go to bed, Little Hoot's parents said "But wait! What about a bedtime story?"... "And don't forget a glass of water." Haha! My mom bought this book from Anthropologie for Sophie's birthday. I'm so glad we own it! It'll definitely be a frequent read.

After all our books and interest in robins, I found a simple craft to make "rocking robins" on a random (but cool) blog I'd never visited before. We traced and cut out circles from the cardboard of empty cereal boxes.

We tore and crumpled little pieces of red tissue paper to glue on the belly.

Then we folded the circles in half and glued on the red tissue belly, an orange beak and a yellow tail feather.

Will's robin is on the left. Sophie's (with a lot of help from me) is on the right.

For awhile, my kitchen window was looking very spring-ish with our robins and flowers and turtles.

Another super cute idea for edible birds nests came from here. {Will and I also discussed the nest questions at the top of that link and categorized birds that swim vs. fly.}

We discussed how the Shredded Wheat cereal and coconut are like the twigs, branches and grass clippings that birds use to build their nests and the butter was like the mud that held it all together.

Sophie and Will each crumbled a biscuit of shredded wheat into the bowl.

Sophie lined the muffin tin with paper liners.

So cute to see them working together in the kitchen. :)

Love this cutie.

Sophie dumped 1/4 cup of coconut into the bowl...

and Will spooned 1 tbsp of brown sugar in as well.

I added 1/4 cup of (cooled) melted butter and we tossed it all together.

Then they pressed the mixture into and up the sides of the muffin liners. This made six nests.

And into the oven they went - 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

After they cooled, we served them as a treat with dinner with three grapes in each (for the eggs). Aren't they cute?

This idea came from another blog I follow and it seemed like a simple, fun craft that Will and I could work on one evening. We made a "nest" out of yarn using diluted glue and a small balloon propped in a dish to set the shape.

Will clipped lots of long strands of yarn...

swished the strands around in the glue...

dragged his pinched fingers down the length of it to remove the excess glue...

and draped the yarn around the curved top of the balloon.

I helped him keep the appropriate shape of the nest when placing each strand.

We left it dry for a couple days and then I let Will pop the balloon with a pin to remove it.

I found this pair of birds at the Dollar Store for Will to put in his nest.

And we set it on his bedside table. This activity went very well with the Just How Long Can a Long String Be? book above.

On another day, Sophie and I were playing outside and found a bird's nest that had fallen from a tree in our back yard. I told Sophie what it was and that this was a birdie's house.

I remembered one of the books we read suggested you could help birds build their nests by putting out pieces of natural fibers for them to find and use. So Sophie and I hung a few pieces of stretched cotton balls, piece of yarn and felt from the tree in front of our porch.

It also suggested grass clippings, so Sophie pulled some pieces of grass that we left in a bowl near the tree... just for the day.

I found this parts of a bird diagram here and printed one copy on white paper and one copy on colored paper for Will to use as a puzzle.

We talked about the different names of the body parts and which parts were unique to birds that humans do not have.

Will has been so fascinated with looking things up on the computer lately! So we played this really cute Who Am I? game with clues about various birds sung to the tune of This Old Man and then looked up each individual birds pictures on Wikipedia. He LOVED this! I'd highly recommend checking it out (the song game, I mean).

And finally, on a night recently, the kids did some feather painting on their new easle to wrap up our bird activities for now.

I gave each of them a feather and a small bowl with two paint colors in it.

I'm pretty sure Will did this last year and it seemed to work out better. This day, the feathers just seemed saturated so quickly and weren't easy to work with. Will didn't mind, though. He just kept "painting" away. I think what might have worked better is to have them paint on a table instead of the easle and just dribble some paint on a page for them to swirl their feathers around in for a softer, wispier look.

Sophie's work:

Will at work:

After painting, they made feather collages by drizzling glue on a piece of construction paper and pressing different colored feathers into it.

My conclusion to the feather work: feathers are not fun to work with. Ha! They're messy and hard to clean up. :(

But the rest of our bird activities were a hit! The only thing we didn't do that I wanted to was make bird feeder treats to hang outside. But that seems like a winter activity anyway, so maybe we'll do that next fall/winter.