Three months ago, when we were choosing our unit studies for the summer, Missy exuberantly chose 'birds' as her choice of study. She has been very patient waiting for her turn to pop up. When you are doing 3 and 4 week units, though, the time moves very slowly, especially when you are 6 years old. Every few weeks I would be asked, "Mommy, when are we going to do my birds?" I would say in my best Mommy voice, "Soon." Well, 'soon' has finally arrived and I have a very happy little girl.
I decided that we would do an abrupt end to our Ocean unit and dive into birds this week. I gave Missy a taste of what the unit would be like by going on a bird hunt on Friday. We went for a walk around our farm yard looking at birds with our binoculars. Missy's excitement was contagious. Well, it was contagious to me. I started to feel the her excitement whenever we spotted a new bird. We tried to figure out what kind of bird it might be. I am not a bird person so I didn't have a clue as to what some of them were. I can spot a crow and a robin but after that I am clueless.
We had to go town on Saturday for Rocky's soccer tournament so I squeezed a visit in to the book store and found a field guide for Saskatchewan birds. You would have thought I bought Missy the original of The Iliad. She was bubbling over with happiness. She hasn't let that book out of her sight since I gave it to her. Everytime there is a bird in the yard, she dives for her book to figure out what kind it is. I have never seen Missy so interested in anything before. It is encouraging for me to see her excitement.
We started our bird unit today. We read about what makes a bird a bird. Do you know what it is? No! it is not that they fly. No! It is not that they have beaks. (Did you know that octopuses and squids have beaks? We learned this today. All I can say to this is: Huh!) Feathers are what makes a bird a bird. Again, huh!
We also drew a picture of a bird then labeled its anatomy. The kids got the biggest giggle when they had to label the bird's rump. They thought that was pretty self-explanatory but they humoured the instructions and labeled it anyway. Then they made a bird from potato prints. I got this idea from The Usborne Art Skills book. We used cardboard edges dipped into brown paint to make the tree outline and then dipped quartered potatoes into red paint for the bird's body. There was more finagling done to make the head and the tail but it was a cute looking bird.
Tomorrow, Missy has informed me that she is going to finger paint a bird. She has many plans for this unit. This scares me.