Animals: Birds Day 1

Ok, back on track.  Ready for some school this week, since it is my spring break from teaching, so I'll have a little extra time.  Since it is April, we moved on to animals!  (I realize I never did summer, but I couldn't really think of any activities to do with summer and we did do the seasons tree activity at the beginning and read a book so at least she got some exposure to it.  I'm ready to move on).

For this first week, we are going to be talking about birds.  Or course we did our usual Letter and Number warm up for the letter L and the number 12.

Then on to birds.

We read Birds by Kevin Henkes (the same author that wrote Lily's Purple Plastic Purse).  Super cute book.  It gave a good, basic introduction to birds.

We then made a picture of birds following this template.  (The link doesn't work for me, so I just saved the image, opened it as a word document and printed it from there).  She colored, then cut out the pieces and assembled it herself, following the small picture.  It looks awesome!  We talked about all the pieces as we were putting it together and what else a bird has that is not in the picture.

We then focused on bird beaks and did a little experiment.  I got four bowls of "bird food" (mini marshmellows, raisins, chips, and water) and four "bird beaks" (toothpick, tongs, tweezers, and a straw).  She then had to try each beak on each food and see which one worked the best.  We looked at some pictures of bird beaks and talked about how they are different and why they need to be different.  She had so much fun!  And she loved eating the chips and marshmellows when were done.  And yes, she continued to use the "beaks" to eat them.  Haha.