Nesting

We finished up our June curriculum on Wednesday (yes, I know June still has a few more days but we are going out of town and I want to start July).  The girls learned about nests while doing some more ABC identification.  I have a cute little bird house and stuffed birds that my nephew handed down to us a while ago so each girl got a baby bird and we placed our alphabet cards in the house.  They took turns drawing a card, identifying the letter and the picture on the back.  We talked about what items were food and which were not.   

They did fantastically well identifying the homes for different people and animals.  I am astounded by their memories.  I think this will be a game we add to our road trip bag and may use it while we are camping to see if we can find any of the homes in the forest.

I adapted the nest building activity a little bit.  I made dough that was supposed to be super silky soft and great for rolling things out.  It wasn't, but it made decent clay and it smelled really good (it's made with hair conditioner and corn starch).  I used a number die, as opposed to one with dots because I wanted to work on their ability to recognize digits.  They rolled the die, identified the number and counted out that many pieces of mulch or lavender to stick in their "nests".  They really enjoyed this and by morning the clay had hardened sufficiently for gentle handling.

One of their favorite activities was "Do as I Do".  We talked about how baby birds learn by watching their mommies and then they took turns giving us instructions.  I was impressed by how well they were able to wait for their turn to be the mommy bird.  After we did this for a while, I brought out the skill review sheet and gave them instructions to fill it out.  They had less attention span for this activity but still pretty well.  

We had snack and watched a YouTube video of Disney's bird show, which was pretty fun.  

Good-bye June, it was great learning about homes.

I am really excited for July's nature detective theme!