When Jared was fiddling with the basketball hoop we discovered a Cardinal's nest in the trees lining our driveway. I saw a couple of birds repeatedly flying to and from a single spot, stood below it and heard cheeping. I got the ladder while the parents were away and sure enough! There were these tiny, featherless, little things opening their enormous mouths to the sky! (sorry sweeties, I'm not your mom). So we've had fun watching the mom and dad take care of those babies.
I decided to use our resident birds as a jumping-off point for summerschool this week. Here's what we did:
DAY 1: Making birds: I cut out a basic bird shape out of poster board, 1 for each kid. I got my supply of feathers and gave each child a bottle of Elmer's glue to squeeze on their bird shape (and tried really hard not to micromanage their glue usage. They each have their own way of squirting it!). After they got the glue on (by which I mean all over the place), they could choose feathers to put all over their birds. Here are the finished products. I even found exactly 3 googly-eyes in my unboxed-so-far craft stuff.
DAY 2: Making nests: We went outside in the morning, each with a bowl (would have used paper bowls, if I'd had them, but I didn't. Instead we lined a regular bowl with wax paper. Paper bowls would be so much easier). The cardinals had flown the coop and evacuated the nest by then. I read online that they don't re-use their nests, so I took the liberty of taking it down, showing the kids how it was made, and talking about what birds would want for their nests. Then we all went around the yard and collected stuff for making bird nests and put it in our respective bowls (pine needles, sticks, grass, feathers, flowers in some cases). While we were out and about we saw a rabbit, some cool green beetles, and Seville caught a frog, so lots of good outdoorsy-stuff going on. When we were done collecting (and I could sweat no more, about to collapse of pregnant-heat-exhaustion) we went inside and glued the nests together. We basically liberally drizzled Elmers glue all around/on/through our nests and left them to dry. It took them a couple of days, but then I removed them from the wax paper and bowls, and we had little nests.
DAY 3: Making eggs: we made salt dough, and I taught them how to roll a little ball in their hands or on the table to make an egg. I had to make a lot of eggs for them, but they had fun. They also got to experiment with making snakes.
DAY 4: Painting the eggs we made yesterday
DAY 5: We pulled the nests out of their wax paper/bowls and put the eggs in. (We actually went to a park this day for our main event)
1 comment:
Wow, awesome, how fun for the kids (and you too, I'm sure.) Good job, Mama. :)
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