Skip to main content

Learning About Birds

Every month I get so excited about our Mother Goose Time Curriculum and I say its our favorite theme, but then the next theme is just as good. They are really nailing it this year. We are learning about Birds and Eggs for April. This week has been amazing. The suggested stories have been great, the activities engaging, and the information we are getting about our feathered friends has been phenomenal. I am also doubly pleased because again I can use this as my daughters science as well. It is so convenient to be able to teach the science and social studies units together. Makes my job easier and lets them learn and work together. It's a beautiful thing.

Week One is titled In the Nest. It is all about nests, eggs, hatchlings, bird food, and learning to fly. We have learned all about the birds life cycle and most importantly we have learned about adorable baby birds. The first day was about nests. We wrote our names on eggs this month instead of name tags and then placed them on a poster of a nest. Then we took our supplies outside because we finally had some sunshine and we needed some fresh air. I love that Mother Goose Time is so flexible and portable. We put a blanket down and did the invitation to create activity. We made little nests out of the materials and even used some grass and flowers to decorate the nests. After the nests were built we decided to make some origami birds to go in them. You can not make a nest and not make birds My daughter has been really into origami after watching an old Reading Rainbow episode we checked out from the library. We also played the Stick Stack game while we were outside. It was a lot of fun, we used our pocket cube as a big dice and them placed the amount of sticks that was rolled onto the nest picture to build our own nest. We mixed the adding numbers with the subtracting numbers on the cube to make it more challenging. We also looked at birds around our lake and listened for birds while we were out there.



Day 2 was about eggs and was also filled with fun facts and activities. We made the invitation to create which was a cut out of an egg, an egg carton and some pom poms and clothes pins. We put our paint in the egg carton and then used the clothes pins to pinch the pom poms and turn them into paintbrushes. After this I made some play dough out of Peeps candy and let him use the E cookie cutter from this months box to make impressions and cut outs in the dough. They loved making and playing with the Peeps dough. This was from a recipe that I found years ago and don't remember where I saw it. You put 5 Peeps in a bowl then add 3 Tbsp cornstarch and 1 1/2 tsp cooking oil. I microwaved it for 30 sec. then stirred it until it became dough like then kneaded it a little adding more cornstarch if needed. If your kids have never microwaved a Peep its a lot of fun to watch. They get huge! We also read a book that we own that gives more information about eggs and hatching times and chick development. 






Another highlight of the week was our bird inspired tea time that we had. We like to have tea every Thursday and eat treats that we made together while reading great books and poetry. The kids love it. This week I found a couple great poetry books featuring birds. We made strawberry oat bars and bird nest candies. While we were waiting for the bars to cool we did the Bird Feeder activity and then hung our feeders around the patio.



Also I just wanted to share a really proud moment. My husband and kids watched a movie a couple nights ago while I was at work and my daughter realized that the mosquito in the movie that was drinking blood was a boy. She remembered last month when we were learning about mosquitos at the pond that only the females drink blood. She proudly told me that the movie was wrong and I did a happy dance that she actually does listen to me. Thanks Mother Goose Time!


*Mother Goose Time has generously provided this curriculum to us in exchange for our stories and honest opinions*


    

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Month of Nursery Rhymes!

So far we are only in day 2 of our Mother Goose Time Nursery Rhymes theme for February and we are loving it. I printed out the coloring pages for this months theme in the member resources section of the  Mother Goose Time website. Each color page goes with the days nursery rhyme, it has a cute picture and the nursery rhyme printed on it. After the month is finished they will each have a cute nursery rhyme book of their own. I can not wait to share all 20 of the nursery rhymes with my kids, some of them were ones I had forgotten until I flipped through the book, and then I couldn't believe I hadn't read them to my kids before. As a Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador we are given a monthly focus topic to think about while we are doing the lessons with our kids. This month is about assessments. Mother Goose Time gives you plenty of ways to assess the progress of your students. I started thinking about how I use assessment in our homeschool. Because I only have 2 students and th...

Bug Homes

This week with  Mother Goose Time we learned all about Bug Homes. We talked about bugs that use plants as their homes, live in dirt, make hills, webs, and hives. This was such an interesting week especially for my older daughter. She had so many questions and these topics sparked so many conversations. I think our favorite day was about hives. We learned so much about bees and we even did a fun experiment. One activity we did was the Honeycomb activity. This was an invitation to create project so I set up everything that they would need and then let them create. This helped my son with his fine motor skills because we used little hexagon stencils to draw the picture, It also gave me a chance to have him verbally tell me what he included in is picture. He did a great job and retained quite a bit of information. I loved that after the project was over he was able to tell me what was going on in his picture. He included the hexagon cells of the honeycomb, them he ...

Lets Talk About Manipulatives...And a Give-Away!

I am so excited about this post!  Mother Goose Time has allowed us to do a giveaway with our readers! One lucky winner will win 2 bags of Mother Goose Time manipulatives. It will be a surprise what they give you but let me ease your mind, we have loved all the manipulatives they have sent so far. Each month of Mother Goose Time has a theme and everything you get works with that theme. This means you get a meaningful month of learning that is all planned out for you. Every month you get a new calendar set up as well as numbers, shape, and color to add to your circle time. You also get a storybook and a music CD that is matched to the months theme as well. But, I think the most fun items you get is the hands on stuff. They include a stamp to go along with the shape of the month, cookie cutters of the letters you will be focusing on, and 2 bags of really good quality manipulatives. This Months theme is Nursery Rhymes and we received a bag of sheep counters and a bag of lacing s...