Bird Feeder and DIY Printable Field Guide

We’ve seen some amazing birds lately – goldfinches, orioles, and doves to name a few. Each time, my son (who is constantly in motion and lips are always moving) has frozen in awe. So I knew when I happened upon Frank Mazzola, Jr.’s wonderful book “Counting is for the Birds” at the library, it was a must read.

This book has everything I love about children’s books rolled into one: Educational? Check. Rhymes? Check. Beautiful illustrations? Check. Naturally I headed straight for the “check out” counter with this treasure in hand. When I read it to my son, he loved it just as much as I did. I know this because when we were finished, he asked if we could keep it.

Banking on Mazzola’s book sparking my son’s interest, I had made a printable field guide for my son to color. The pages contain generic looking birds that my son could color to mimic the foul we see in our area. I pulled out a bird guide book from the library and asked him to tell me about some of the birds he remembered. He rattled off descriptions of a robin, cardinal, blue jay, etc.

I found pages in the book with photographs of these birds and handed my son a bunch of colored pencils. He colored the birds to match the pictures and wrote the names at the bottom. I was amazed at how much care he took with his coloring and how many birds he wanted to add to his book. (Download your own bird book pages here. Simply cut in half and staple along the left side.)

Next we transformed an empty soda bottle into a backyard bird feeder with instructions from GreenKidsCrafts.com. Visit their website for complete instructions. While I did the cutting on the bottle, my son screwed in the eye hook and added the wooden spoons (purchased at a dollar store) where the birds can perch. We filled it up and hung it under a tree in our backyard.

Now the only thing left to do is wait for the birds … oh, and add any new visitors to my son’s bird book of course!

Fireflies in a Jar (Glow-in-the-Dark Addition)

With more than a dozen plaster beetle shapes left over from our Friend vs. Foe Beetle Tic-Tac-Toe activity, I was determined to put them to use. Having bought some glow-in-the-dark acrylic paint for another activity, I channelled my inner Picasso to make 13 fireflies. I had saved the excess plastic laminate cut from the Nature Scavenger Hunt cards; On it I drew wings with a fine-tip Sharpie, cut them out, and super-glued them to the back of each firefly.

On their glowing lanterns, I used a permanent black marker to write the following numbers:

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 11, and 12. My husband cut me two, 2-inch wood cubes to use as dice. I painted these with the same glow-in-the-dark paint. For the dots, I printed a large black rectangle on sticker paper and used a paper-punch to make tiny circular stickers which I stuck on each side.

Lastly, I printed a jar shape on sticker paper and cut out the center. I measured the outside dimensions of a quart-sized freezer sandwich bag and cut the sticker paper slightly smaller. I peeled the backing and stuck it to the bag. Of course, you could use a real Mason jar but since I didn’t have one, I improvised. To download the jar graphic, click here.

Now it was time to play. My son rotated the dice under a lamp to “charge up” the photoluminescent paint. We placed the fireflies on a paper plate under a lamp for the same reason. Now it was time to head into a window-less room.

How to Play

The game is simple. And so clever. And so not my idea. I have to give credit where credit is due. This activity was inspired by Little Miss Kindergarten’s “Roll the Dice” printables (download them here).

To play, I had my son roll the two dice, add the numbers together, “catch” the firefly wearing that number, and put it in the jar (um … I mean bag). The point was to see how many fireflies my son could catch before the light from the paint faded (and, truthfully, to test my son’s addition in the dark when he wouldn’t be able to count on his fingers).

As you can imagine, capturing pictures of the game in the dark was impossible. The one you see here is lit by a flash and doesn't do justice to how fun (or cute) this activity was. My son loved it and did so much better adding in the dark than I’d imagined (Woo Hoo!).

To learn about fireflies, my son read the following two books:

Flash, Firefly, Flash! by Dana Meachen Rau

Fireflies by Cheryl Coughlan

Did you know fireflies are beetles? We didn’t. But we do now!

Like the game, NOT the craft?

The glowing insects are not necessary and DIY insects aren’t either. To simplify this activity, just buy one of those tubes filled with plastic bugs, stick number stickers on their backs and give your child two dice and a jar. Voila! It’s time to catch some bugs!


Find other great math activities, book suggestions, and ideas at Love2Learn2Days' Math Monday Blog Hop!

Making an Undiscovered Planet

If the Milky Way Galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies in outer space, it stands to reason that there are probably other planets out there somewhere just waiting to be discovered. Based on that notion, and my chiropractor’s account of this amazing craft her daughter did at the library’s story time, my son made his own planet.

Supplies:

Styrofoam ball

Old CD

Toothpick

Glue (white school glue; hot glue is optional)

Paint, glitter, etc.

Instructions:

I cut the ball in half and gave my son some acrylic paints to decorate the two halves. Then I inserted a toothpick in the center of one ball and had my son thread the CD through. Next, I added some hot glue and then topped the toothpick with the second half of the ball. All that was left to do was hand over some white glue and glitter. Once we had glue and glitter everywhere, our ringed planet was complete.

Now it was time to write about our new “discovery.” I created a short book with fill-in-the-blank sentences so my son could describe his planet. Download the “If I discovered a new planet …” book I made for free here.

Once we’d finished writing about (and drawing) the very cold and sometimes invisible “Planet Laser Gun,” I read my son an amazing National Geographic Kids book. When I say amazing, I mean it. A lot of the books at our library were WAY too detailed and scientific for my son’s understanding.

Becky Baines’ Every Planet Has a Place: A Book about Our Solar System provides text that is basic, but informative. The combination of real pictures with doodle-like art keeps the heavy subject-matter playful, too. It is a wonderful introduction for kindergarteners and first graders; check it out!

If I Was A Constellation

There’s something fascinating about the night sky. To help my son see more than just a sky full of “twinkle, twinkle little stars,” I checked out some great books on stars from our local library. First, we read Star Climbing, a fiction book by Lou Fancher. This dreamy book talks about a child who falls asleep imagining what it’s like to play among some of the most popular constellations.

When done, I opened Jessica Dowling’s Glow-in-the-Dark Constellations book to the page showing late summer star formations like Hercules, the Little Dipper, and Cygnus the Swan. We headed into a window-less room to see just what exactly these stars would look like in our night sky.

Finally, I handed my son a full-page photo that I’d snapped of him sprawled out on the floor the day before. I gave him another piece of plain white paper and told him it was time to turn himself into a constellation; he was intrigued.

Because we don’t have a light table, he put the plain paper atop the photo, paper clipped the two, and taped them to a window. Since the photo was printed on regular (i.e. thin) office paper, the sunlight shone through enough for him to make out his picture through the white paper covering it.

Like the constellations in Dowling’s book, he added star stickers to the main points on his body. Then we removed the tape and he used a ruler to draw a straight edge connecting the stars. The final result was awesome!

To wrap up our night sky-inspired activity, I gave my son a 100+ piece puzzle picturing constellations that glowed-in-the-dark. (I snagged this at Tuesday Morning for just $1.99!!) We love doing puzzles together!

10-Pin Addition (Math Bowling)

My mother-in-law served up Danimals Smoothies during a recent visit and my sons instantly fell in love with the little yogurty drinks. The next week when I hit the grocery store, I couldn’t resist buying a pack. 

It didn’t take very long before I came to admire the cute shape of the bottles and went to the recycling bin to rescue them. With a little red ribbon, a paper-maché Christmas ball, and a cardboard box, I was ready to make a math activity sure to bowl my son over. (ha ha)

I painted the Christmas ball with acrylic paint, clipped the hanging string off, and added three black dots to simulate the finger-holes in a bowling ball. This ball worked perfectly because, like a real bowling ball, it didn’t have much bounce.

Then I handed my son the 10 empty Danimals bottles and had him peel off the labels. I added a ring of ribbon with hot glue. Next, we placed some star stickers on the bottom of the shallow cardboard box where the pins should sit and cut one short side of the rectangular box off.

I gave my son a worksheet I’d made and let him bowl away. He rolled twice, recording the number of pins he knocked down each time. Then he added the numbers together to total the pins that he knocked down in the frame. Note: Someone will need to remove the knocked-over pins after each roll and reset them at the end of the frame. After six frames, he added the numbers together. (I gave him a 1-100 numbers grid for help.)

He played four games (whoa!) and asked to forego a new activity the following day to bowl some more. Thanks to this game, he’s getting better at bowling AND addition!

Download a blank score sheet here.

Find other great math ideas and activities at Love2Learn2Day's Math Monday Blog Hop!