Before we left for vacation, Nicole and I started a unit on birds and cats. We predominately used the book
Feathers for Lunch by Lois Ehlert. Most of the ideas we came up with came from the unit resources at
Homeschool Share.
This was a really fun unit. The book is about a cat who is tired of eating canned cat food, so he sneaks out of the house looking for something wild to eat. It introduces many different types of birds. The drawings of the birds are pretty accurate and the last several pages have facts about each of the birds mentioned in the book. Most are even drawn to size. The book also has lots of great rhyming words. One thing the homeschool share unit didn't hit on are all the plants that are mentioned by name in the book too. So, this book has a lot to offer as far as different directions you could take with it.
My plan was to be talking about what we had been learning while on vacation. I knew we would spend a lot of time outdoors and there was a really great math lesson intertwined with the book. The idea was to go outside over the course of a day or a week or whatever, and make tally marks of the different color birds we found. Then, at the end of week, make a simple graph showing the number of blue, red, gray, black, white, etc. birds that we saw. I was really excited to do this...but kept forgetting:-(
This unit went perfectly with our trip, we saw soooo many different types and colors of birds, especially at our condo in Gatlinburg. The lady below our condo had a humming bird feeder, so they were out in the evening. There were many opportunities to reinforce what we had learned the previous week.
I knew we would have a lot of down time while in Atlanta, so I took some materials from the unit. One day, Nicole and I made a bird/cat mask. She did a great job coloring it, gluing feathers, spreading sparkles and sticking stickers on her mask. She still likes to wear it around. btw...in this picture, she has sunglasses on under the mask, that's why the eyes are black.
We also talked about why God created the birds to be different colors. I introduced the idea of camouflage to her. We played a hide and seek type game called "Camouflage the Birds". We printed pictures of all the birds from the book (and I laminated them one day) and we hid them around a couple of rooms, camoflauging them against similar colors. So, the red cardinal was hiding near a red vase. The bluejay was hiding near a blue picture. The green hummingbird was hiding on top of a green tile. It was fun to camouflage the birds, and when everyone got home from the convention that night, they were able to find birds all over the living and dinning room.
When we got home from vacation, we put all of activities together to make a lap book. I'm sorry this picture is flipped the wrong way. If I weren't lazy I'd fix it. Anyway...on the top (really right side) is a flip book about cats, then our birds from our camouflage the birds game, and a small booklet about what kinds of food that cats eat. In there, we had a wild side and a tame side. The wild side had pictures of birds, mice, snakes, etc...the tame side basically had pictures of cat food cans.
Then on the bottom (left) of the lapbook are our rhyming word eggs. The eggs flip up to reveal the rhyming words. Like wild and mild or lunch and munch. Nicole matched up the rhymes and I helped her glue the labels together.
The back of the lap book has a chart comparing cats and birds. A cat has live kittens and feeds them milk, a bird lays eggs. A cat walks, runs and climbs, a bird flies. A cat has fur, a bird has feathers....you get the point. And we also have our Bible verse, "Mathew 6:26 Behold the fowls of the air: fr they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?"
This was a story about Billie Bird that we got to read and act out. Then, Nicole had to label the bird parts (beak, feathers, wing, crown, etc). There is also a bird bingo game that I made up, but we never played it.
Just before vacation, as our unit officially ended we spent some time painting (which both the girls LOVE to do) with
Feathers instead of paint brushes. It was messy and fun.
Even Hannah got in on the action.
There were two things I wanted to do, but never got around to. 1. to make an edible bird's nest (using chocolate, lo mein noddles, and jelly beans) and 2. to make a bird nest from items we collect outside and stick them into play doh. We sort of did this a few months ago when we read Owl Babies, so I didn't feel to bad missing out on that.
Feathers for Lunch, and the unit at Homeschool share had so many fun activities and hits most of the subjects in one way or another. It was a really fun book to read and use. I recommend it.
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The other day, we were doing some counting. Jeremy's started doing basic addition and subtraction with Nicole, so we decided to work on it a bit more. What better way than with edible manipulatives. We poured out some Skittles and sorted them into groups of ten. We counted them each individually, then by tens. Then Nicole sorted them by color and we counted again. We talked about which color had the most and which had the least. Then we started adding and subtracting. The best part was subtracting, because that meant we could eat the skittles.
At one point there were 7 orange skittles. I asked Nicole how many orange skittles she wanted to subtract and she said, "Um, 7" . So, then I asked her to guess how many would be left. She didn't know....so we tried it. She stuffed all 7 orange skittles in her mouth. Again I asked her how many were left and she wasn't sure, because we haven't talked much about the number zero. It was funny though because she had
orange drool pouring out of her mouth.
Obviously she doesn't know how to add and subtract yet...but it sure is fun to learn AND eat sweets at the same time.
Nicole really looks forward to our time in the mornings to read and do activities together. It's our little half an hour or so of uninterrupted Nicole & Mommy time...and I love it too.
