Home Preschool: Birds

As I sit on the couch writing up this blog post, I'm listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner, the calming white noise coming through the baby monitor, and the loud chirps of angry birds fighting for bird seed outside my window. Despite the fact that we live in the city, we get a TON of birds around here. In fact, we had the privilege of witnessing an American Robin build a nest and raise a baby right on our back deck.

It just seemed like the perfect time to learn about birds. Granted, our lessons were pretty simple: birds have beaks, birds have feathers, birds build nests, etc. But it was so fun, and a really great learning experience!

Here are some of the activities we did:

The nest on the right is made from yarn dipped in Mod Podge, and left to dry in a curved, foil-lined bowl. The painting on the top left was made with feathers.

Here are the links to the other two projects, though we modified both of them to fit our needs and use what supplies we already had.

Baby Birds and Nest Craft

Paper Plate Birds

We also used these Montessori-inspired Bird Puzzles, which seemed a bit challenging for Pumpkin, but we had fun with it anyway.

Here are the books we read:

Counting On Birds

Every Day Birds

Chicks

Robins: How They Grow Up

Here's a quick note about the last one: it is REALLY informative and nicely illustrated. I felt like a learned a lot from it. But it is very descriptive. Pumpkin is still upset about this page, weeks later. So tread carefully if you think your child might not be ready for this.

Here are some of the videos we watched:

Educational videos (most are from National Geographic Kids):
Amazing Animals: Secretary Bird
Amazing Animals: Harpy Eagle
Amazing Animals: Spotted Owl
Amazing Animals: Gentoo Penguin
Learn About Baby Birds
Birds: Educational Video for Kids

Slightly less educational, but still fun videos (especially for very little ones who don't understand a lot of science-y stuff):
Elmo's World: Birds
Sesame Street: Murray Learns about Birds
If you have access to Amazon Prime, Season Five: Episode Nine of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is a fun episode about birds and nature.