Baby birds!

Spring is here!  Flowers are blooming, birds are busy, and eggs are everywhere.  We had fun learning about spring in the classroom last week.  The kiddos made little spring baskets using berry baskets from the farmer's market.  They used 1/2" strips of colored paper to weave through the sides and two standard pipe cleaners twisted together for the handles.  It sure is good fine motor work for young students.  They were excited about the baskets and what we would make to go inside.

We read some fantastic books about spring and the signs of the season in nature and the world around us.  This topic always includes baby animals and eggs, so, we learned a bit about them too.  This is my all time favorite non fiction book on eggs:

 

It has lots of interesting information about eggs and the many animals that are born from them.  The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous!  If you don't have this book in your collection, it is a must have.  And I just found this one below as well.  It is brand new and will be released on April 14th, 2015.  I have ordered it for my classroom and can't wait for it to come.  I have most of the books in this series.  They are all wonderful.

 

They are a perfect compliment to these oldies but goodies:

 

 

 

 

 

This year, we decided to make baby birds to go in the spring baskets.  We cut toilet paper rolls in half.  The kiddos painted them as an independent center one day.  Each child did two.  Then later in the week, the kids added eyes, beaks, and feathers with an adult.  These items were glued on using a low heat  hot glue gun, which is why it is an adult supervised activity.  The adult does the gluing, but the child is the creative director regarding color, size, and placement of the items.  If you have a way to make these kinds of projects happen in your classroom, they are very special to the students and will be treasures for years to come.  Here are a few of ours:

Aren't they adorable?  The kiddos also added colored eggs and some sweets used for math problem solving to the baskets as well.  You can see more about our colored eggs on this blog post: Coloring Eggs in the Classroom.  Our last day before break was super special because we also got to see and touch these cool things:

A big thank you goes out to my AMAZING instructional aide, Stacey Grant, for bringing in those cool eggs to share with our kiddos.  I also want to thank the student in my class who brought in the baby chicks.  He was so excited about them hatching at home and I am so happy that he was able to share them with our class.  Thanks so much!  It made our day!

I have so much more to tell you about our studies of spring.  This post is getting very long, though, so it will have to wait for the next one.  Hope you are enjoying all the fun curriculum connections that spring provides.

Happy spring!
Happy teacing!