Joy School - Birds

I am WAAAAYYYY behind in my Joy School posts. We have still been having it, we are still having a great time, and I've still been taking pictures. I just haven't been posting.

So in an effort to catch up, here is a Joy School lesson we did during our Animals Theme.

Lesson:

We learned lots of interesting things about birds. There was so much information, we could easily have split this into a few days.

-We talked about the different places birds made their homes; Beside water, in the antarctic, in the ground, in trees, in the grass, etc.

-We learned that all baby birds come from eggs.

-We looked at the different kinds of beaks birds can have and how they help them get different kinds of foods. We looked at which beaks would be good to crack nuts, which would be good for scooping up food, which would be good for grabbing bugs, and so on.

-We looked at bird feet and how some were good for swimming, some for holding onto branches and some for catching other animals to eat.

-We learned that not all birds could fly. Some could run very fast (ostrich) and some were good swimmers (penguins)

-We learned that even though other animals can have wings (bats), or webbed feet (frogs), or lay eggs (crocodiles), or even have a duckbill, (platypus) that did not make them birds. The thing that definitely makes an animal a bird is that it has feathers. Then we went over the several different types of feathers birds have, and what each type is for.

Science Time:

This mom had printed out several pictures showing the different stages as a chick hatches from an egg, and the kids worked to put them in the correct order. Some of the pictures were quite tricky to place, especially when the bird was part in and part out of the shell. Then the moms stepped in to give them a hand and point out the subtle differences.

Wiggle Time:

We played a duck-waddling game with a ball tucked between their knees and the kids had to waddle to the other end of the room. Pretty tricky for those little legs, but they got it in the end!

Craft: Bird Feeder

We followed these instructions here. I think we may have used too much water, or not let them sit enough before we picked them up, because they didn't gel the way we had hoped. But the ones on the instruction website turned out really cool, so it might be worth it to give it another go.

Art: Birdies in a nest

This one was so cute! The kids dyed eggs the colour of their choice and then we let them dry. After they were dry, we added googly eyes, little felt wings, and construction paper beaks to create baby chicks.

When our chicks were done, we made nests for them by cutting a brown paper bag to make it shallower, folding the ends back, and filling it with the cut up remains of the bag that we trimmed off. Isn't the end product adorable?

Story Time: There are lots of cute books featuring birds, but a couple of suggestions are The Ugly Duckling, The Nightingale, or The Sneetches. (Strictly speaking, I can't guarantee that the Sneetches are birds, but I have always thought they were.)

Snack Time:

This mom has some great cookie cutters in her kitchen. Not only did we use them to make the bird feeders, but we also created an on-theme snack out of bread and cheese just by trimming the bread into a goose, and the cheese into chicks.

She also made a fun treat by turning no-bake cookies into little nests, and adding a couple of chocolate mini-eggs to the centers.

Craft #2: making 'real' nests
We did our best to create a true-to-life birds nest. We gathered up mud, dirt, grass, string, hay and feathers and got good and dirty assembling them. Very fun, but pretty messy, so be prepared!

Music Time:

We did a counting-down rhyme I'd never heard before called Five Feathered Birds:

Five feathered birds sitting on the door,

One flew away and then there were four.

Four feathered birds singing in the tree,

One flew away and then there were three.

Three feathered birds looking at you,

One flew away and then there were two.

Two feathered birds sitting in the sun,

One flew away and then there was one.

One feathered bird looking like a hero,

He flew away, and now there are zero!

What was fun about this one, is that she had prepared five little birds for them all to hold, and they all stood in a line holding their birds. When the corresponding birds in the song flew away, they sat down, until at the end they were all sitting.

We also sang Two Little Blackbirds Sitting on a Hill.

And that was our fun Bird Day at Joy School.