This week's nature walk was accomplished on my parent's property, it was a nice change of scenery, with some new things to look at. For us, this walk was all about signs of spring! We are all suffering from an acute case of end of winter blues; so it was timely for us to be searching out the hope of a sunny, warm day on the horizon. I'm happy to proclaim that hope was found!
SIGNS OF SPRING
We observed lots of signs of spring as you can see in the pictures above. We also spent a few minutes again practicing "quietness" to listen to the sounds around us. The kids are getting better at this! We heard lots of different birds, and are working diligently to learn to identify more and more songs. So far, we know the Pileated Woodpecker, Red-Bellied Woodpecker, Northern Flicker (just learned this week), Eastern Towhee, Crow, Mourning Dove, and Blue Jay (just learned this week). And just this evening Alex announced to me that he knows the sound an American Robin makes and proceeded to mimic it. I, foolishly, chose to doubt him again, until of course we pulled the sound up on the internet, and yep you guessed it, bingo, right on! I think he knows a lot more of them than I do; this all just by being out in nature!
Also, in honor of our signs of spring, we discussed the fact that birds are making nests now for their eggs and we had fun with a project that I learned about on Barb's blog. We made a Nesting Materials Bag. We stuffed an empty onion bag with scraps of yarn, napkins, brown paper bags, cotton stuffing, grass clippings, and cat hair (seems ironic doesn't it?!). I cut a few holes in the bag to make sure the birds could get at the pieces.
We secured the top of the bag with a rubber band, and hung it outside near our feeders. Our hope is that we may notice some of these materials in a bird nest in the future.
For our study of a focus area item this week (Birds)...well it sort of found us...we had a great time identifying a new bird to our backyard. We were blessed to observe and study the Northern Flicker, I wrote a post about our encounter HERE.
Oh, and to celebrate our nature walk this week, when we returned back to my parent's house, we made these cute little candy bird's nests which I had found out about at Kim's Blog. They were so yummy and fun to make! Thanks for sharing this Kim, they wen't along perfectly with our studies.
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Apr. 2, 2008 - Untitled Comment
I saw that nest bag idea somewhere, that was on my list, but decided against it....you guys did great!!!
Have an awesome blessed day in Jesus!!!