Abigail's Day: Bird week

This week was "Bird Week" at the Wilson house....I had some pretty grand plans but not all of them made their way into reality-however, I'm coming to learn that EVERY week is different around here and I should give us all as many "free passes" as possible.

At the end of most days I try to look back to see if anyone learned anything at all ( and it doesn't even need to be on theme, or something I MEANT for us to learn!) and usually someone has learned something. So we put that into the win category. ;-)

Anyway, this week started off discussing how God made birds. I then asked Ransom what made a Bird special from every other animal. He guessed that they had eggs, a nest and that they flew. So we talked about other animals that had eggs, nests and flew ( i.e. fish have eggs, alligators have nests and butterflies fly). Then we talked about how Bird's have FEATHERS!!!

As "luck" would have it we are in the middle of potty training with Tabitha so Ransom and Tabitha were introduced to our theme through some iPad videos while we sat around in the potty waiting for things to happen....

Here are the ones I think are worth watching:

(warning: Tabitha was a bit freaked out by the baby bird once it was born-but the process of it coming out of its shell was pretty cool!)

And then also this really great song All Birds Have Feathers from an episode of Cat in the Hat.

Activity One: Hummingbird Craft

I printed off the different pieces and cut them out ahead of time. I then gave Ransom a picture of the finished product ( the picture above, actually) and then told him to glue it onto his sheet of paper. I gave him no direction and just let him try to match the pieces. It was a good little puzzle exercise for him! And bonus, I got to make dinner uninterrupted!

You'll need:
The printable
Scissors
Another piece of paper to glue your bird onto
colors/paints etc.
glue stick

Activity Two: Feather Walk
Yup, you guessed it! We walked around the neighborhood and looked for feathers! Luckily, we live in an area that is infested with doves. So the feathers were plentiful, though not very diverse in nature. It was still fun to collect them and it re-stated the fact about feathers being special to birds.
The kids then ran around the house hold feathers they had collected, flapping like birds.... Not my idea, but whatever.

Activity Three: Egg Addition
Using this Printable here, Ransom put the right number of eggs into the nests using an ink pad and his finger. He also really enjoyed this worksheet too even though he just wrote the numbers.

Activity Four: Bird Calls
Using your computer visit this Website which allows you to listen to the various calls of different birds-the fun part is that you then guess and match if you think it is the bird's 'alarm', 'call' or 'song'! I actually really enjoyed this activity too! And we were able to talk about Bird's special language of song!

Bird Books:
Here are the books we enjoyed that had sometimes a very "loose" bird theme: