Birds Need Homes
As well as being obsessed with snakes and alligators, our class has a special interest in birds. We all can identify the mockingbirds who visit our playground, but we also spend plenty of time looking through our bird field guide, our National Geographic bird book and talking about owls. Last week, we read Owls Live in Trees. This week we found out how other birds live. In addition to Jane Yolen’s wonderful You Nest Here with Me, we also read A Nest Is Noisy and looked at more field guides of North Carolina birds and nests of North America. Miss Maria brought in five nests from her personal nest collection and we had an eyes only nature display. Birds put all kind of things from fishing nets to party confetti in their nests. Our class nest art project was made from shreddings from last week’s color mixing sponge project and holiday catalogs. We each painted a bird with watercolors for our nest. We read Owl and Woodpecker, a book about learning to get along, and The Crow’s Tale , a Native American myth in which Crow brings fire from the sun and it turns his rainbow colored wings an iridescent black. The morning we read the crow story, three huge black crows synchronously visited the playground.
Birds Need Homes week was the culmination of our seven week science curriculum that began with Living and Non Living Things. We’ll be building on what we learned this Fall for the rest of the year, but in the winter months we’ll be doing more focused math and language arts instead of integrating it into other daily activities and individual Montessori lessons. After our autumn activities, we have a much better sense of what skills all our students need and will be planning accordingly. Not that we won’t also be talking about owls.
Category: Preschool Room 1
