Friday, September 24, 2010

Nature Lessons: A September Walk {Bird Unit}


For our nature lessons this year, I found a great online {free} resource to use as our guide, Nature Stories for Children. It is an older, copy write free, text and is made available online from the Children's Books Online Rosetta Project. They have a lot of wonderful texts there. I highly recommend checking it out sometime!

The text asks which bird makes more noise, a Robin or a Blackbird. To answer this question, we had to listen to their songs. Nicole at Tired, Need Sleep, provided a link to a great website called eNature.com. There, we were able to listen to a recorded mp3 of both a robin and a blackbird. We decided the blackbird was much louder. The kids enjoyed being able to hear the robins and blackbirds on our nature walk.

Nicole also made up a fantastic bird card printable. I put the cards on a binder ring and we take it with us on our nature walks. To be fair, we scare off any birds within about 75 yards of us when we walk {its hard to be quiet with a 1 year old, 2 year old and 5 year old}, but we are ready with our identification cards if we see a bird that is flying away as fast as its little wings will take it!

Two of the books we used in this lesson were "Now I Know Birds" from Troll and "Usborne First Nature Birds." Both were excellent, but Now I Know Birds was perfect for Mustang and Charger. Just the right amount of information for their short attention spans.


I found some parrot crafts in the clearance section of Hobby Lobby, so we made them. This gave us the chance to discuss the parts of a bird a little more.

Mustang also started her nature journal this week. I asked her to draw something about her lesson. She asked me for the ring of bird cards and this is what she did.




I was quiet impressed.

Our lesson is linked up at Homeschool Creation's Preschool Corner. Lots of great mommas link up their extremely creative ideas there! Check it out!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How much fun. What a great nature study.

Anonymous said...

oo what a fun nature study! Mustang's bird is great!!