Feathered Friends

What's so special about our feathered friends? That's exactly what we found out as we explored the world of birds. We talked about their feathers, wings, beaks and the nests they build...

A sensory bin filled with birdseed, eggs and birds of all kinds, started us on our exploration.

Styrofoam balls of all sizes and some feathers made for a great fine motor activity as we created feathered friends...

Are You My Mother?

and Flap Your Wings

 

sparked our knowledge and our curiosity about birds. What do we already know about them? What will we learn?

We know birds builds nests of all kinds which we read some more about later on in our bird exploration, but we had a giant nest filled with eggs and birds for some dramatic play about birds. We read The Best Nest for some inspiration. 

We love treats and so do birds! Using pipe cleaners and cheerios, and our fine motor skills once again, we made some treats for birds to hang in our trees. 

Beaks. Birds have beaks. We read the book called Beaks

 

and learned lots of things beaks help a bird do. We used tools that resemble bird beaks, like tweezers, clothespins, toothpicks, spoons and straws to manipulate and eat things with different textures that birds might eat like goldfish, popcorn, cranberries, raisins, bananas, worms (gummy ones!), and nectar (juice).

 

Feathers. Birds have feathers. We read the book, Feathers Not Just For Flying, 

and found out that birds use their feathers for many things- warmth, insulation, camouflage, to attract a mate, cushioning for their nests and more! We read the book Birds

 

and then used feathers to dip in paint and paint as a bird might if their tail feathers were dipped in paint! It was a different experience to use the tree in our play yard for an easel.

"If birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew, think what the sky would look like" - Kevin Henkes 

Mama Built a Little Nest 

encouraged us to try our hand at building nests. There are many different kinds of nests, but we used nest building materials like- dried grass, leaves, sticks, straw, hair, feathers, etc. Instead of using mud or spit (ew!) like many birds do, we used some play dough to keep the pieces together. 
It was pretty hard. It made us have a lot of respect for birds and their skill in building nests. And, they don't have hands like we do! 

Feathers for Lunch 

illustrated for us many different kinds of birds. 
Using bird shapes along with wings, beaks and feet of different shapes, we added googly eyes and feathers to create birds of our own and tell stories. It was a great activity for creativity, fine motor (squeezing that glue!) and language. 

My bird likes to fly around in the trees.

My bird likes to fly around. 

He lives in a nest.

He likes to eat Cheerios.

Her name is Tonton.

She lives in a pokey tree in the forest. 

She likes to eat eggs- other birds’ eggs. 

She eats the crumbs from the babies. 

She likes to fly around all the way back home.

My bird’s name is Blue.

She lives way up high in a palm tree. 

She eats Cheerios! 

She likes to fly around until she gets dizzy. 

She has a beautiful blue body with pretty blue eyes. 

Her wings are so special.

She lives in a huge tree far away. 

Her name is Sosa. 

She likes to fly around

the big tree to her nest.

Donning binoculars and our visual and auditory senses, we went on a bird watch. It was a quiet bird day and we didn't see many- a few pigeons. We heard some birds but couldn't find them. We talked about the birds we've seen before around our play yard- flitting finches, noisy blue jays, worm hunting robins, trash-eating black birds and the always present cooing pigeons. 

Feathered friends provided us some great times of discovering and exploring!