Category: Ages 2-6: Bird Unit
This post was originally a reminder to hang up your hummingbird feeder. I hung our feeder out this past Wednesday and Thursday we noticed our first hummingbird! Now, I’m going to change the cover picture to highlight some free copywork printable with famous sayings like… The early bird catches a worm. When one door shuts, another opens. A friend in need, is a friend indeed. A stitch in time saves...
EggSperiment #4 Will an egg float or sink in water? What happens when we add salt to the water? We added a lot of salt to one cup and had plain water in the other cup. The egg in salty water floated, while the other egg sunk. We talked about why that was the case and how salt molecules changed the density of the water. Egg Activity #5 Do eggs...
EggSperiment 1: Why do eggs move the way they do? Have the kids roll an egg around on a table. Talk about why they are shaped the way they are. Because eggs are a funny and oblong shape, they roll and wobble around in a certain way. Eggs wobble when they roll so they won’t go far from a mother hen and they will stay inside of a nest. If eggs...
EggSpect the UnEggSpected with this series of fun Science EggSperiments! In this series you’ll find a dozen terrific egg activities to do with you kids. So… for the first EggSperiment… Because Easter is coming up, we devoted the past week to some fun science EggSperiments. This experiments requires you to soak a raw egg for two days in vinegar, so I’ll share this experiment first so you have time to...
Often while I’m reading aloud (in this case we’re still reading Little House in the Big Woods) I have the kids working on other things. A few days ago I had them cut out the pieces of a quick owl lapbook (All Owls, a 50cent lapbook by homeschool bits). It had great tidbits of information, reinforcing all we had read last week. They put it together and were so excited...
As I mentioned yesterday, we did a lot of reading about owls to lead into the awesome science study on owls! We talked about the forest food chain (who eats whom) and then I asked them what owls ate. Owls eat mice, voles, snakes and other small animals. They swallow their prey whole and about eight hours later spit out the parts they can’t digest in a pellet of fur...
We have had so much fun with this forest unit so far. We’ve done a ton of crafts and coloring. The kids colored in these cute owl pages (which are no longer available – http://katibura.xyz/printable/printable-coloring-pages-for-adults-owls). The kids did a simple fall craft we got at oriental trading: All the kids have been doing the forest animal sorts and we talked once again about vertebrate and invertebrate animals. The kids sorted...
To make our bird unit especially appealing to LD we, of course, had to add in some science egg-speriments! While DD and I were unable to smash our eggs… LD did!! We’re not quite sure why, but then when he tried it with a second egg he couldn’t break it no matter how hard he tried. Anyway, this experiment was designed to show how strong egg shells are and how...
We looked at the air bubbles coming out of this egg when it was placed in vinegar and talked about why the shell is porous. This lets the growing embryo get oxygen. We then talked about how since it is porous it can let things through — like acid (vinegar), acid rain and pollutants. We talked about DDT (how eagles nearly became extinct)– and how poisons, pesticides and so forth...
This summer, I saw a really interesting tool for studying chickens at My Montessori Journey. It was a chicken hatching set that you can buy for about $35. It was a great idea, but I decided the kids might get more out of it making their own. So, earlier this summer at Grams’ house, I printed out some chicken embryo pictures. One set has the developing chicken embryo with the...
Last night I set up the table with a few more bird-related activities. These are activities for my 2 1/2 and 4 year olds: In the middle of the table are styrofoam eggs. The girls decorated them with plastic push pins (I don’t know what else to call them!) and colorful brads. I also set out a bird identification set and the bird lapbook we made years ago. The girls...
I showed this picture last week, I think, but what better visual to go with our bird unit! We have started off the year with a new bird unit. We did a pretty extensive bird unit last year and learned all about galahs, magpies, Murray magpies and Port Lincoln parrots (lots of pictures in the “Where we Live” label). We did a lovely lapbook to go with those (I just...
Here are a few pictures of the bird lapbook we did last year. We’ve had this out and have chatted a lot about how different the birds sound (galahs make a really distinctive ruckus). ED did the coloring last year; DD did the cutting activity (cutting the slits in the feathers). Hmmm… this would be PERFECT for ED right now. She really loves practicing with scissors. I’d better head off...
This activity would probably be perfect around Easter! This summer as I wandered around Hobby Lobby I saw all the cute colored brads. Not just the plain round ones as were available in our town last year, but flowers, hearts and things like that. I picked up a couple boxes of brads, a push-pin looking thing I also saw at H-L or Michaels and a bunch of styrofoam eggs. All...